Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Responses to Shirrmacher: Evgeny Morozov, David Gelerntner, John Brockman, Annalena Mcaffee, George Dyson, John Bargh, Steven Pinker, John Perry Barlow, Gerd Gigerenzer, Virginia Heffernan, Jesse Dylan, Douglas Rushkoff, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bilton, Jaron Lanier, George Dyson, Daniel Kahneman [10.27.09] • Frank Shirrmacher [10.27.09] • Stuttgarter Zeitung Controversy [10.22.09] • John Markoff [10.6.09] • Darwin's Intellectual Legacy Speaker Series in Chile [9.7-8.09] • Stuart Brand [8.20.09] • Frankfurter Allgemeine: Ed Regis [8.15.09] • Suddeutsche Zeitung on Craig Venter and George Church [8.13.09] • Spiegel Online [8.13.09] • Charlie Rose with Freeman Dyson [8.14.09] • Alison Gopnik [8.11.09] • Douglas Rushkoff [8.11.09] • Richard Wrangham [8.10.09] • Emanuel Derman [8.7.09] • New York Times: John Markoff [8.03.09] • Stuart A. Kauffman [7.27.09] • New York Review of Books: Freeman Dyson [7.30.09] • George Church and J. Craig Venter [7.30.09] • George Dyson [7.27.09] • Vanesa Woods and Brian Hare [7.17.09] • Svante Pääbo [7.4.09] • Gavin Schmidt [6.29.09] • David M. Eagleman [6.24.09] • John A. Bargh [6.19.09] • LA Times [6.09] • Lera Boroditsky [6.11.09] • Don Tapscott [6.4.09] • Max Brockman [5.26.09] • Laurence C. Smith [5.27.09] • Jonathan Lehrer [5.21.09] • Seed [5.21.09] • The Economic Manhattan Project [5.21.09] • The Economic Manhattan Project [5.15.09] • C.P Snow [5.7.09] • Larry Brilliant [5.7.09] • Nathan Wolfe [5.1.09] • Philip Campbell [4.26.09] • Edge London Dinner [4.20.09] • David Gelernter, John Markoff, Clay Shirky [4.26.09] • Simon Baron-Cohen [4.24.09] • AC Grayling [4.16.09] • Nassim Nicholas Taleb [4.16.09] • Sir John Maddox [4.15.09] • John Maddox [3.4.97] • Kraussfest 2009 [4.10.09] • Heinz Pagels [4.10.09] • Yochai Benkler [3.31.09] • Timothy Taylor [4.26.09] • By The Late John Brockman [3.22.09] • Peter Dizikes [3.22.09] • Steve Jones [3.25.09] • Clay Shirky [3.17.09] • Seirian Sumner [3.17.09] • Brian Cox [3.4.09] • Lewis Wolpert [3.4.09] • Denis Dutton [2.24.09] • Armand Leroi [2.24.09] • Juan Enriquez [2.24.09] • James Lee Byars [2.9.09] • The Edge Dinner 2009 [2.9.09] • The New Yorker [2.9.09] • Nathan Wolfe [1.30.09] • Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1.30.09] • Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges [1.27.09] • Steven Pinker [1.22.09] • Jerry Coyne [1.21.09] •Katinka Matson [1.23.09] • Frank Wilczek [1.15.09] • Steven Pinker [1.11.09] • John Markoff [1.11.09] • V.S. Ramachandran [1.1.09]• James Lee Byars [1.1.09] • World Question Center [1.1.09]

...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

"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).

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]

[...]

RESPONSES TO FRANK SHIRRMACHER ON THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

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? Who was the first man to forget his wedding anniversary? [...]

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. [...]

EVGENY MOROZOV
Commentator on Internet and politics "Net Effect" blog; Contributing editor, Foreign Policy

I share many of Schirrmacher's concerns, and I think we need to start looking beyond technology's impact on cognition and behavior and broaden this discussion to its impact on character and identity. This would allow us to acknowledge many of the undeniable positive developments — yes, there is a wealth of great data on Wikipedia and the sheer amount of human knowledge available for free at the moment, especially to those who have never had access to any knowledge, is staggering. However, it's not the availability of this data that matters most: it's how we get to consume it, what we learn (or not) from the process, and how the very availability of this data changes how we think about ourselves.

Watching how young people — especially those who are in their early teens — go about constructing their digital identities out of the scraps and pieces they find online is particularly insightful. Of course, songs, books, movies — these have always been the Lego pieces that teenagers relied on to define who they are. Today, however, they have a never-ending stock of these Lego pieces to choose form and all their peers are obsessively watching this extremely painful process in real time. In my opinion, the impact of social networking is particularly crucial here. For modern teenagers, their Facebook walls have become more representative of what they are and what they want to be than their bedroom walls. The only difference is that we don't expect strangers to break into our bedrooms and spray offensive graffiti on the walls — but this happens on Facebook all the time. Some of it, by all means, is great, as it exposes these young people to the dangers of this world early on, but some of it could also be quite traumatic.

We simply do not know how exactly the young people would cope with fashioning and refashioning their online identities in an online environment where traditional signifiers of "cool" — music, videos, books — are available for immediate download for next to nothing — and arrive with embedded metadata that tells their owners how many of their friends have already bought and played a particular album or a movie. It's a fair guess that the ultimate stage of the real-time Web would be real-time trends, where it would be possible to track the cultural zeitgeist on the fly. This would mark the end of the era of weekly music charts. But how do you stay "ahead of the curve" if the cultural curve is always changing, your own cultural "cool" sensors are always on, and the likes of Facebook continue to feed you with information about what your friends are currently consuming in the background? As more and more of our media consumption happens in public — through Last.fm or NetFlix and whatever social features that Amazon will build on top of Kindle — one unfortunate consequence might be an increase in the overall degree of cultural conformism, despite the immense cultural treasures hidden in the long tail.

The real tragedy of the "age of informavore" thus may lie not in the fact that we are consuming too much information, but that this consumption — at least when done for reputational purposes, which it almost always is for the young — may turn us into extremely placid and conforming creatures. Will this be a society where democracy — powered by actively engaged citizenry — can survive? I can easily relate to Schirrmacher's general uneasiness here — we in Europe have too much painful history behind us and are very reluctant to take any more chances here.

As for the Internet's impact on character, I think that we'll begin seeing the real downside of this new digital environment in 5-10 years when Facebook-dependant "digital natives" who are now finishing college will mature and become parents and professionals. The problem with so many permanent online connections is that their very presence breeds endless and unhealthy self-retrospection — if not outright professional and personal anxieties. Come to think of it, the Internet — and especially Twitter and Facebook — has made us fully aware of what the path not taken looks like, many times over. What really concerns me here is that these shallow, weak, but permanent connections to the friends of our "younger selves" — from high-school, from college — perhaps, best captured by the one-sentence status updates on Facebook — are going to be very burdensome.

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. Infinite storage and permanent human connections have put so many pressures on the human psyche that the heaviness of our past may one day simply crush us. Letting go, leaving our past behind, moving on — will "digital natives" still know how to do any of that without becoming "digital refuseniks"?

DAVID GELERNTER
Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, Drawing Life

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 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? Who was the first man to forget his wedding anniversary?

Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.

Like Copernicus had a stronger idea than Galen? That was some time ago. Like gothic ribbed vaults being a stronger idea (& effectively replacing) Norman barrel vaults, ca 1100? People have made an effort to remember certain things ever since there have been certain things to remember.

Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and whom I find a fascinating thinker, notes that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body.

Fascinating & complex things can & do go on outside the human body and (for that matter) in it; but if they aren't conscious, they aren't thinking. Why isn't natural selection an example of thinking (nature mulling things over) outside the human body? You can say, sure, natural selection is thinking; but then you've merely defined thinking out of existence. A thunderstorm is a very complex & highly organized activity. Does it show that the atmosphere is thinking?

We have a crisis of all the systems that somehow are linked to either thinking or to knowledge.

No we don't. There's no crisis in cable TV. There's no crisis in film-making. There was a crisis in painting, but it's sorting itself out. There's no crisis in architecture — architecture is thriving. What's the basis for this assertion? Except that Schirrmacher is European?

JOHN BROCKMAN
Publisher & Editor, Edge; Author, By The Late John Brockman; The Third Culture

At a dinner in the mid-sixties, the composer John Cage handed me a copy of Norbert Wiener's book, Cybernetics. He was talking about "the mind we all share" in the context of "the cybernetic idea". He was not talking Teilhard de Chardin, the Noosphere, or any kind of metaphysics.

The cybernetic idea was built from Turing's Universal Machine in the late thirties; Norbert Wiener's work during World War II on automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns; John von Neumann's theory of automata and its applications (mid-forties); Claude Shannon's landmark paper founding information theory in 1948.

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.

The most important inventions involve the grasping of a conceptual whole, a set of relationships which had not been previously recognized. This necessarily involves a backward look. We don't notice it. An example of this is the "invention" of talking. Humans did not notice that they were talking until the day someone said, "We're talking." No doubt the first person to utter such words was considered crazy. But that moment was the invention of talking, the recognition of pattern which, once perceived, had always been there.

So how does this fit in with the cybernetic idea?

It's the recognition that reality itself is communicable. It's the perception that the nonlinear extension of the brain's experience — the socialization of mind — is a process that involves the transmission of neural pattern — electrical, not mental — that's part of a system of communication and control that functions without individual awareness or consent.

This cybernetic explanation tears the apart the fabric of our habitual thinking. Subject and object fuse. The individual self decreates. It is a world of pattern, of order, of resonances. It's an undone world of language, communication, and pattern. By understanding that the experience of the brain is continually communicated through the process of information, we can now recognize the extensions of man as communication, not as a means for the flow of communication. As such they provide the information for the continual process of neural coding.

How is this playing out in terms of the scenarios presented by Frank Schirrmacher in his comments about the effect of the Internet on our neural processes? Here are some random thoughts inspired by the piece and the discussion:

Danny Hillis once said that "the web is the slime mold of the Internet. In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds. You can imagine something happening on the Internet along evolutionary lines, as in the simulations I run on my parallel computers. It already happens in trivial ways, with viruses, but that's just the beginning. I can imagine nontrivial forms of organization evolving on the Internet. Ideas could evolve on the Internet that are much too complicated to hold in any human mind." He suggested that "new forms of organization that go beyond humans may be evolving. In the short term, forms of human organization are enabled."

Schirrmacher reports on Gerd Gigerenzer's idea that "thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else."

John Bargh notes that research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, has become democratized. "This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment … we are so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate." The import of Bargh's thinking is that the mere existence of a social network becomes an unconscious influence on human judgment and behavior.

George Dyson traces how numbers have changed from representing things, to meaning things, to doing things. He points out that the very activity involved in the socialization of mind means that "we have network processes (including human collaboration) that might actually be ideas."

What does all this add up to?

Schirrmacher is correct when when he points out that in this digital age we are going through a fundamental change which includes how our brains function. But the presence or absence of free will is a trivial concern next to the big challenge confronting us: to recognize the radical nature of the changes that are occuring and to grasp an understanding of the process as our empirical advances blow apart our epistemological bases for thinking about who and what we are. "We're talking."

ANNALENA MCAFEE
Writer, Journalist; Former Editor of The Guardian's literary supplement, the Guardian Review


Is human nature, or at least fundamental human behaviour, being changed by digital technology? I'd like to see some good empirical evidence before hazarding a conclusion — evidence identifying a growth in attention deficit disorders which links this to an exponential increase in computer use, studies citing escalating incidences of memory loss among the young, comparative brain scans of multi taskers and single taskers with their cerebral hemispheres lit up like Christmas trees. Perhaps we can safely attribute an increase in cases of carpal tunnel syndrome to widespread computer use, but while this might give a fashionable cachet to wrist splints among the young, it won't change human behaviour and is no cause for moral panic. The same wrist injury can be caused by playing the ukelele, or indeed any musical instrument, or by gripping your quill pen too tightly — writer's cramp — but we have never worried that the young are spending too much time practising their scales or writing sonnets.

The editor of the Wall Street Journal is reported to have accused Google of "encouraging promiscuity", which, if true, is a serious charge. His complaint, however, refers not to any advocacy of lax sexual behaviour but to Google News, whose daily aggregate of enticing headlines from around the world discourages old-style loyalty among readers. Once we plighted our troth for life, for better or worse, circulation rise or slump, to one newspaper delivered regularly to our door or bought at newsagents. Now, dazzled by the daily digital passeggiata, we've turned our backs on the stale pleasures of familiarity and spend heady hours communing with whichever passing news providers take our fancy. All for free. We barely pause to ask their names. Monetary issues apart, is this a bad thing? Or even new? Isn't it about choice? Survival of the slickest. I believe they call it the market. Once Rupert Murdoch has worked out a way of actually charging these fickle punters for his services, surely everyone will be happy and it will be business as usual.

So in the absence of hard evidence about the baleful effects of the Internet, one has to resort to anecdote and ill-informed personal observation. These are mine. Young people are on the whole nicer in the digital age. They are happier to spend time with, or at least tolerate the company of, adults than was my own generation of posturing post-soixante-huitards. The digital generation values friendship and understands reciprocity more than its earlier counterparts and is more emotionally insightful and expressive, qualities which I speculate may be enhanced by social networking and texting. These young people may not necessarily be more literate or informed but, unlike previous generations, they know exactly where to go when information is required.

Yes, the personal blogs and social network sites have unleashed an embarrassing pandemic of exhibitionism. But, and here is the liberating thing, we don't have to read it. Look away. And this compulsive urge to tell all in blush-makingly dull detail is no departure in terms of human behaviour. People have been writing painstaking accounts of their inconsequential lives since they first learned the alphabet and got hold of cheap stationery. For every Samuel Pepys, James Boswell or Virginia Woolf there were legions of tedious self-regarding monologuists, showing off to an imagined posterity.

As to predictive programs and I-Tunes "Genius", don't they serve a useful and very old-fashioned purpose? Like your best friend, or the cheerful proprietor of the neighbourhood bookstore, or the dreadlocked manager of your favourite record shop, they know what you like and will helpfully alert you when that artist/writer or, someone operating in a similar field, is about to produce.
"You'll love the latest Alice Munro. And if you like Devendra Banhart, check out Vetiver." But 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.

I'm alarmed, though, at the prospect that I might have to understand exactly how they work; I cannot imagine buckling down to reviews of "the structures of software", alongside critiques of the new biographies of John Cheever or Ayn Rand. I had always assumed that one of the pleasures of civilization was being relieved of our ancestors' obligation to know how things work. I open my fridge in the morning and, while I am aware that it achieves its effect with compressed gas and electricity, I could not tell you how it works, only that it is pleasingly cold. I reach for a pint of milk, untroubled by my ignorance of modern milking techniques, and my landline rings, by a process which, for all I know, might as well be sorcery.

There are many things I do not know and do not care to know, and I am sure refrigerator engineers, cattle farmers and telephone operatives would have no desire to acquaint themselves with my own small area of expertise. Granted, I find computers more intrinsically interesting than fridges or phones or cows and I did spend some time learning MS-DOS and html code. But in our fast-moving age, these skills are now as useful to me as fluency in Greenlandic Norse or Crimean Gothic. I no longer have the time or patience to find out how it works; just show me what it does.

There is an anxiety that we're all like fat frat boys gorging ourselves at the free, 24-hour, all-you-can-read information buffet. Even here, though, in bouts of online gluttony, we display timeless human traits: the urge to binge in times of plenty, feasting till we're queasy on roasted mammoth, since instinct tells us there might be nothing to eat out there again for a month or two. But our systems are their own regulators. We can only take so much. After a while we long for a simple glass of water, an indigestion pill and wholesome human pleasures, which may or may not involve a book (electronic or paper), music (ipod or live), sport, landscape, love. And as one of your correspondents writes, the young — for whom digital innovation is an unremarkable fact of life — are better at handling the screen-life balance than their seniors, who are too often awestruck by innovation and waylaid by serendipity. The young take for granted today's surfeit of mammoths and they moderate their intakes accordingly.

I wonder about the suggestion that ideas are now facing some kind of Darwinian Day of Judgment, where perfectly sound, original and useful notions will be consigned to the Flames of Oblivion simply because they've run out of room upstairs in the Heavenly Hall of Fame. Surely it was ever thus. There has always been too much information — far more than a single human brain could handle — for the curious and literate with access to a library. Now everyone can have a go. We are all innocents at large in this pleasuredome, agog in Alexandria.

To baulk at this ease of access, to pathologise online abuse and ignorance, is to behave like a medieval monk, horrified by the dawn of secular literacy and fearful that his illuminated manuscripts will fall into unclean hands. There will always be more penny dreadfuls than priceless masterworks; there is only one Book of Kells but there are many, many Da Vinci Codes. And there is room for them all. No shortage of shelf space here. No shortage of readers, either.

You might be frowning into your screen over findings on the absence of retroviral restriction in cells of the domestic cat, he might be surfing Google News for updates on Britney's latest tour, she might be assessing commercial possibilities of hydrogen-producing algae, while they browse the UFO sites, book a cheap flight, and check the last stanza of a John Donne sonnet. It's all there for the taking. How you use it is the point. And who knows? The Britney fan, who might never have strayed into a library in his life, could one day find himself momentarily sidetracked by a website about the New Zealand poet Charles Edgar Spear, click through a hyperlink to TS Eliot and develop a passion for modernist verse. Or, more likely, drawn by a wittily-worded account of Britney's current Australian tour in one of Mr Murdoch's publications, he might eschew his libertine ways, shell out for an online subscription to the newspaper, and settle down to a life of blameless monogamy.

GEORGE DYSON
Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines

In the beginning, numbers represented things. Digital encoding then gave numbers the power of meaning things. Finally, the order codes were unleashed, and numbers began doing things.

The cultural and intellectual transitions described by Schirrmacher and his commentators are higher-level manifestations of this. 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.

Is free will ours to lose?

JOHN BARGH
Social Psychologist, Yale University; Director. the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation) Lab

I tend to worry less about information overload at the personal, individual level and more about it at the societal and governmental level. The human brain is long used to being overloaded with sensory information, throwing most input away in the first half-second after sensing it; we are constantly bombarded by 'primes' or implicit suggestions as to what to think, feel, and do — yet we manage usually to stably do one thing at a time.  The brain is used to dealing with conflicting messages too, and managing and integrating the activity of so many physiological and nervous subsystems — but as the work of Ezequiel Morsella is showing, keeping all of that management out of conscious view so we never experience it.

We are already and have long been multitaskers, in other words, we just do it (so well) unconsciously, not consciously.  It is conscious multitasking (talking on the phone while driving) that we are so bad at because of the limits of conscious attention, but multitasking per se — we are built for that. As we gain skills those skills require less and less of that conscious attention so that an expert such as Michael Jordan, or today, Kobe or Lebron, can consciously plot his strategy for weaving through a maze of defenders down the court because his limited conscious attention is no longer needed for dribbling, body movements, head fakes, and so on.  Driving a car requires incredible multitasking at first but is soon much less difficult because the multitasking 'moves downstairs' and out of the main office, over time.

But Schirrmacher is quite right to worry about the consequences of a universally available digitized knowledge base, especially if it concerns predicting what people will do.  And most especially if artificial intelligence agents can begin to search and put together the burgeoning data base about what situation (or prime) X will cause a person to do. 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.

But the discovery that people are actually rather easy to influence and predict (once we know the triggering environmental cues or prompts) is fact is today being exploited as a research tool because we know now that we can activate and study complex human psychological systems with very easy priming manipulations.  A quarter century ago the methods to activate (to then study) aggressive or cooperative tendencies were more expensive and difficult, involving elaborate deceptions, confederates, and staged theatrics.  It is said that the early cognitive dissonance theorists such as Eliot Aronson used to routinely have their graduate students take theater classes.  And other social psychologists of that generation, such as Richard Nisbett, have publicly complained (in a good-natured way) about 'rinky-dink' priming manipulations that somehow produce such strong effects. (This reminds me of Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic; here the belief that complex human outputs must require complex causes.)

It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, 'democratized' it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students.  This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and wocial environment.  And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate.

More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher's postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes. (Of course this is already being done in a crude way through advertising, both commercial and political; we have just shown for example that television snack food ads increase automatic consumption behavior in the viewer by nearly 50%, in children and adults alike.)

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

You're at a dinner in a restaurant, and various things come up in conversation — who starred in a movie, who was president when some event happened, what some religious denomination believes, what the exact wording is of a dimly remembered quotation. Just as likely as not, people around the table will pull out their iPhones, their Blackberries, their Androids, and search for the answer. The instant verification not only eases the frustration of the countless tip-of-the-tongue states that bog down a conversation, but offers a sobering lesson on how mistaken most of us are most of the time.

You'll be amazed at the number of things you remember that never happened, at the number of facts you were certain of that are plainly false. Everyday conversation, even among educated people, is largely grounded in urban legends and misremembered half-truths. It makes you wonder about the soundness of conventional wisdom and democratic decision-making — and whether the increasing availability of fact-checking on demand might improve them. 

I mention this because so many discussions of the effects of new information technologies take the status quo as self-evidently good and bemoan how intellectual standards are being corroded (the "google-makes-us-stoopid" mindset). They fall into the tradition of other technologically driven moral panics of the past two centuries, like the fears that the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the postcard, radio, and so on, would spell the end of civilized society.

Other commentaries are nonjudgmentally fatalistic, and assume that we’re powerless to evaluate or steer the effects of those technologies — that the Internet has a mind and a will of its own that’s supplanting the human counterparts. But you don’t have to believe in "free will" in the sense of an immaterial soul to believe in "free will" in the sense of a goal-directed, intermittently unified, knowledge-sensitive decision-making system. Natural selection has wired that functionality into the human prefrontal cortex, and as long as the internet is a decentralized network, any analogies to human intentionality are going to be superficial.

Frank Schirrrmacher’s reflections thankfully avoid both extremes, and 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? And as you answer, take care to judge the old and new eras objectively, rather than giving a free pass to whatever you got used to when you were in your 20s.

One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you’ve been doing things. From now on, you won’t be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you’ll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?

If social critics started to scrutinize the immediate past and obsolescing present and not just the impending future, our understanding of the effects of technology on intellectual quality would be very different. The fact is that most of our longstanding, prestigious informational institutions are, despite their pretentions, systematically counter-intellectual. In the spirit of the technophobe screeds, let me describe them in blunt, indeed hyperbolic terms.

Many of the articles in printed encyclopedias stink — they are incomprehensible, incoherent, and instantly obsolete. The vaunted length of the news articles in our daily papers is generally plumped out by filler that is worse than useless: personal-interest anecdotes, commentary by ignoramuses, pointless interviews with bystanders ("My serial killer neighbor was always polite and quiet"). Precious real-estate in op-ed pages is franchised to a handful of pundits who repeatedly pound their agenda or indulge in innumerate riffing (such as interpreting a "trend" consisting of a single observation). The concept of "science" in many traditional literary-cultural-intellectual magazines (when they are not openly contemptuous of it) is personal reflections by belletristic doctors. And the policy that a serious book should be evaluated in a publication of record by a single reviewer (with idiosyncratic agendas, hobbyhorses, jealousies, tastes, and blind spots) would be risible if we hadn’t grown up with it.

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress. 

JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Co-founder , Co-Chair, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Cyberspace pioneer ("The Jefferson of the Internet")

I am the very definition of fiercely mixed feelings on this subject.

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.

Even as we can drill deeper into the collectively-known, our ability to know the collective becomes more superficial.

More than ever, we have to trust the formation of Collective Consciousness, the real Ecosystem of Mind.

GERD GIGERENZER
Psychologist; Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin; Author, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Technology and Mentality

Frank Schirrmacher asks, does new technology change human cognition and behavior, and if so, how? This question is a true wake-up question, but its answer is far from obvious. The technophobe might conjecture that new technologies grow smarter while humans grow dumber, like my bank accountant yesterday, who could not calculate 20% of 500 euros without a pocket calculator. The technophile would respond that everything simply gets better, just as eyesight improves with glasses and friendship becomes easier with Facebook.

But there is a more interesting answer: the dynamic symbiosis of technology and mentality. A symbiosis is to the mutual benefit of two different species but requires mutual adaptation. Consider the invention that has changed human mental life more than anything else, writing and, subsequently, the printing press. Writing made analysis possible: One can compare texts, which is difficult in an oral tradition.

Writing also made exactitude possible, as in higher-order arithmetic; without a written form, these mental skills quickly reach their limits. But writing makes long-term memory less important than it once was, and schools have largely replaced the art of memorization with training in reading and writing. So it’s neither loss nor gain, but both. And this means new adaptations between mentality and technology. In turn, new abilities create new tools that support new abilities, and so the spiral evolves.

The computer is another instance. The invention of the computer has been described as the third information revolution, after the advent of writing and the printing press. As early as the 1960s, electrical engineer Doug Engelbart had designed the first interactive computer tools, including the mouse, on-screen editing, screen windows, hypertext, and electronic mail. However, at this time, human-computer interaction still seemed science fiction; computers were for processing punched cards, not for interacting with humans. The impact computers had on society and science was difficult to imagine, and it went in both directions: computers and humans coevolve.

The first computer was a group of human beings: the large-scale division of labor, as evidenced in the English machine-tool factories and in the French government's manufacturing of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the new decimal system in the 1790s.

Inspired by Adam Smith's praise of the division of labor, French engineer Prony organized the project in a hierarchy of tasks. At the top were a handful of first-rank mathematicians who devised the formulas; in the middle, seven or eight persons trained in analysis; and at the bottom, 70 or 80 unskilled persons who performed millions of additions and subtractions. Once it was shown that elaborate calculations could be carried out by an assemblage of unskilled workers rather than by a genius such as Gauss, each knowing very little about the larger computation, Charles Babbage was able to conceive of replacing these workers with machinery.

Babbage, an enthusiastic "factory tourist," explicitly referred to this division of mental labor as the inspiration for his mechanical computer, using terms from the textile industry, such as 'mill' and 'store' to describe its parts. Similarly, he borrowed the use of punched cards from the Jacquard loom, the programmable weaving machines that used removable cards to weave different patterns. Thus, initially there was a new social system of work, and the computer was created in its image.

Through dramatic improvements in hardware and speed, the computer became the basis for a fresh understanding of the human mind. Herbert Simon and Allan Newell proposed that human thought and problem solving were to be understood as a hierarchical organization of processes, with subroutines, stores, and intermediate goal states that decomposed a complex problem into simple tasks.

In fact, a social system rather than a computer performed the trial run for the Logic Theorist, their first computer program. Simon's wife, children, and graduate students were assembled in a room, and each of them became a subroutine of the program, handling and storing information. This was the same the Manhattan project, where calculations were done by an unskilled workforce of mostly women, at low pay.

Similarly, Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, regarded the mind as a society of dumb agents, collectively creating true intelligence. Similarly, anthropologists have begun to use computer analogies to understand how social groups make decisions "in the wild," such as how the crew on a large ship solves the problem of navigation by storing, processing, and exchanging information. The direction of the analogy thus eventually became reversed: Originally, the computer was modeled on a new social system of work; now social systems of work are modeled on the computer.

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.

VIRGNIA HEFFERNAN
Columinist ("The Medium"), The New York Times

The metaphor that seems most alive to me in Frank Schirrmacher's disquisition is one of eating. On the one hand, the title of the interview — "The Age of the Informavore" — suggests a model of man as an eater of information. On the other, Schirrmacher speaks provocatively of information that battens on human attention (and dies when starved of it); of information, in other words, that eats us. This two-way model of consumption in the Internet age — we consume information, information consumes us — ought to be kept before us, lest we repress it and be made anxious that way.

Because — right? — 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?

If the Internet is a massive work of art, as I believe it is, it has modernist properties: it regularly promotes a feeling of unease and inadequacy (rather than jubilation, satisfaction, smugness, serenity, etc). As Schirrmacher's interview suggests, perhaps this is because the Internet user feels as though he is forever trying to eat or be eaten, and he's both undernourished and afraid.

A critic of the Internet attuned to its aesthetic properties might ask: How does it generate this effect? I'm inclined to believe there's a long and fascinating answer to this question. I'm also inclined to believe that, in time, consumers and producers of the Internet — and we are all both at once — will find ways to leave off apocalyptic thinking and generate and savor the other sensory-emotional effects of the Web.

JESSE DYLAN
Film-Maker; Founder, free-form.tv; Lybba.org

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.

Schirrmacher speaks about Kafka and Shakespeare reflecting the societies they lived in and the importance of artists to translate the computer age.

This lecture is a warning to us to be aware of the forces that shape us. The pace of change in new technologies is so rapid it makes me wonder wether it's already too late.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Life, Inc.


These are refreshingly disturbing reflections on the digital, from the mind of a caring individual who would hate to see human cognition overrun before its time. As one who once extolled the virtues of the digital to the uninitiated, I can't help but look back and wonder if we adopted certain systems too rapidly and unthinkingly. Or even irreversibly.

But I suspect Schirrmacher and most of us cheering for humanity also get unsettled a bit too easily — drawn into obsessing over the disconnecting possibilities of technology, and making us no better than an equal and opposite force to techno-libertarians celebrating the Darwinian wisdom of hive economics. Both extremes of thought and prediction are a symptom of thinking too little rather than too much about all this.

This is why Schirrmacher's thinking is, at its heart, a call to do more thinking — the kind of real reflection that happens inside and among human brains relating to one another in small groups, however elitist that may sound to the technomob. ("Any small group will do" is the answer to their objections, of course. Freedom means freedom to choose your fellow conversants, and not everything needs to be posted for the entire world with "comments on" and "copyright off'".)

It's the inability to draw these boundaries and distinctions — or the political incorrectness of suggesting the possibility — that paints us into corners, and prevents meaningful discussion. And I believe it's this meaning we are most in danger of losing.

I would argue we humans are not informavores at all, but rather consumers of meaning. My computer can digest and parse more information than I ever will, but I dare it to contend with the meaning. Meaning is not trivial, even though we have not yet found metrics capable of representing it. This does not mean it does not exist, or shouldn't.

Faced with a networked future that seems to favor the distracted over the focused and the automatic over the considered, it's no wonder we should want to press the pause button and ask what this all means to the future of our species. And while the questions this inquiry raises may be similar in shape to those facing humans passing through other great technological shifts, I think they are fundamentally different this time around.

For instance, the unease pondering what it might mean to have some of our thinking done out of body by an external device is in some ways just a computer-era version of the challenges to "proprioception" posed by industrial machinery. Where does my body or hand really end? becomes "what are the boundaries of my cognition?"

But while machines replaced and usurped the value of human labor, computers do more than usurp the value of human thought. They not only copy our intellectual processes — our repeatable programs — but they discourage our more complex processes — our higher order cognition, contemplation, innovation, and meaning making that should be the reward of "outsourcing" our arithmetics to silicon chips.

The way to get on top of all this, of course, would be to have some inkling of how these "thinking" devices were programmed — or even to have some input into the way they do so. Unlike our calculators, we don't even know what we are asking our machines to do, much less how they are going to go about doing it. Every Google search is — at least for most of us — a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box.

So 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
Author, Does IT Matter?; The Big Switch

The digital computer, Alan Turing told us, is a universal machine. We are now learning that, because all types of information can be translated into binary code and computed, it is also a universal medium. Convenient, cheap, and ubiquitous, the great shared computer that is the Internet is rapidly absorbing all our other media. It's like a great sponge, sucking up books, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio shows, movies, letters, telephone calls, even face-to-face conversations. With Google Wave, the words typed by your disembodied correspondent appear on your screen as they're typed, in real time.

As Frank Schirrmacher eloquently and searchingly explains, this is the new environment in which our brains exist, and of course our brains are adapting to that environment — just as, earlier, they adapted to the environment of the alphabet and the environment of print. As the Net lavishes us with more data than our minds can handle, Schirrmacher suggests, we will experience a new kind of natural selection of information and ideas, even at the most intimate, everyday level: "what is important, what is not important, what is important to know?" We may not pause to ask those questions, but we are answering them all the time.

I expect, as well, that this kind of competition, playing out in overtaxed, multitasking, perpetually distracted brains, will alter the very forms of information, and of media, that come to dominate and shape culture. Thoughts and ideas will need to be compressed if they're to survive in the new environment. Ambiguity and complexity, expansiveness of argument and narrative, will be winnowed out. We may find ourselves in the age of intellectual bittiness, which would certainly suit the computers we rely on. The metaphor of brain-as-computer becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: To keep up with our computers, we have to think like our computers.

"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? Even if Bilton is correct, another question needs to be asked: does the individualism promoted by the Net's unique mode of information dispersal deepen and expand the self or leave it shallower and narrower? We've been online for twenty years. What have we accomplished, in artistic, literary, cultural terms? Yes, as Schirrmacher points out, we have "catharsis" — but to what end?

Resistance is not futile, says Jaron Lanier. That's certainly true for each of us as individuals. I'm not so sure it's true for all of us as a society. If we're turning into informavores, it's probably because we want to.

NICK BILTON
Adjunct Professor, NYU/ITP; Design Integration Editor, The New York Times


I am utterly perplexed by intelligent and innovative thinkers who believe a connected world is a negative one. How can we lambast new technology, transition and innovation? It’s completely beyond my comprehension.

It is not our fear of information overload that stalls our egos, it’s the fear that we might be missing something. Seeing the spread of social applications online over the past few years I can definitively point to one clear post-internet generational divide.

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. They, or should I say I, feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show.

Frank Schirrmacher asks the question "what is important, what is not important, what is important to know?" The answer is clear and for the first time in our existence the internet and technology will allow it: importance is individualism. What is important to me is not important to you, and vice-a-versa. And individualism is the epitome of free will. Free will is not a prediction engine, it’s not an algorithm on Google or Amazon, it’s the ability to share your thoughts and your stories with whomever wants to consume them, and in turn for you to consume theirs. What is import is our ability to discuss and present our views and listen to thoughts of others.

Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let everyone share their information, build their communities, and contribute to the conversation. I truly believe that most in society have only talked about Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher because they were only spoken to in the past, not listened to. Not allowed to a part of the conversation. Of course they threw their hands in their air and walked away. Now they are finally coming back to the discussion.

As someone born on the cusp of the digital transition, I can see both sides of the argument but I can definitively assure you that tomorrow is much better than yesterday. I am always on, always connected, always augmenting every single moment of my analog life and yet I am still capable of thinking or contemplating any number of existential questions. My brain works a little differently and the next generation’s brains will work a little differently still. We shouldn’t assume this is a bad thing. I for one hold a tremendous amount of excitement and optimism about how we will create and consume in the future. It’s just the natural evolution of storytelling and information.

JARON LANIER
Musician, Computer Scientist; Pioneer of Virtural Reality

It is urgent to find a way to express a softer, warmer form of digital modernity than the dominant one Schirrmacher correctly perceives and vividly portrays.  The Internet was made up by people and stuffed with information by people, and there is no more information in it than was put in it.  That information has no meaning, or existence as information in the vernacular sense, except as it can be understood by an individual someday.  If Free Will is an illusion, then the Internet is doubly an illusion.

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.  Here is why:

The ideas Schirrmacher distills include the notion that free will is an illusion, while the Internet is driven by powers that are beyond any of us; essentially that we don't have free will but the Internet does.  If the message of modernity is "people don't exist, but computers do,"  then expect modernity to be rejected by most people.  Those who currently like this formulation are the ones who think they will be the beneficiaries of it- the geeky, technical, educated elite.  But they are kidding themselves.  

Partisan passions and the "open" anonymous vision of the Internet promoted by the Pirates are so complementary, it's as if they were invented for each other.  The Pirates will only thrive briefly before they have super-empowered more fanatical groups.  

If the new world brought about by digital technologies is to enhance Darwinian effects in human affairs, then digital culture will devour itself, becoming an ouroboros that will tighten into a black hole and evaporate. Unless, that is, the Pirates can become immortal through technology before it is too late, before their numbers are overtaken, for instance, by the high birth rates of retro religious fanatics everywhere.  This race for immortality is not so hidden in the literature of digital culture.  The digital culture expressed by the Pirates is simultaneously nihilist and maniacal/egocentric.

My one plea to Schirrmacher is to shed the tone of inevitability.  It is absolutely worth resisting the trend he identifies.

GEORGE DYSON
Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines

Nine years after his Wake Up Call for European Tech, issued just as the Informavores sat down to eat, Frank Schirrmacher is back, reminding us of the tendency to fall asleep after a heavy meal. All digital all the time may be too much of a good thing. Can we survive the deluge?

I see hope on the horizon. Analog computing! For real. The last we saw of analog computing, we were trying to get differential analyzers to solve problems that can be solved much more accurately, and much faster, digitally. Analog computing is as extinct as your grandfather’s slide rule! Nonetheless, many things can be done better by analog computing than by digital computing, and analog is making a return.

Some of the most successful recent developments — Google, Facebook, Twitter, not to mention the Web as a whole — are effectively operating as large analog computers, although there remains a digital substrate underneath. They are solving difficult, ambiguous, real-world problems — Are you really my friend? What’s important? What does your question mean — through analog computation, and getting better and better at it, adaptation (and tolerance for noise and ambiguity) being one of analog computing’s strong suits.

When you are an informavore drowning in digital data, analog looks good.

DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton; Recipient, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences


Very interesting interview, which is itself a nice example of what Schirrmacher is talking about: it should be read very quickly, to get a vague sense of unease, of possibilities, of permeable boundaries between self and others, between one’s thoughts and those you get from others. You do get something out of it, and may find yourself thinking slightly differently because of it.

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath. 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.

Will all this change what it is like to be human? Will it change what consciousness is like? There must be people out there who study teenagers who have lived in this environment all their life, and they should be the one to tell us. The only teenagers I know well are my grandchildren, and that is not enough of a sample. They use computers a lot, but it has not made them very different. Of course they read much less, and they have a sense of how knowledge is organized that I can only envy — I keep being frustrated by how much better young people are at the task of searching.

Schirrmacher feels that the loss of the notion of free will may be dangerous, especially in Germany — I have a vague sense of what he is saying — perhaps this is a return to the old idea that psychoanalysis was causal in loosening the hold of morality. There really is a lot of stuff there.

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.

October 6, 2009

I.B.M. JOINS PURSUIT OF $1,000 PERSONAL GENOME
By John Markoff

One of the oldest names in computing is joining the race to sequence the genome for $1,000. On Tuesday, I.B.M. plans to give technical details of its effort to reach and surpass that goal, ultimately bringing the cost to as low as $100, making a personal genome cheaper than a ticket to a Broadway play.

The project places I.B.M. squarely in the middle of an international race to drive down the cost of gene sequencing to help move toward an era of personalized medicine. The hope is that tailored genomic medicine would offer significant improvements in diagnosis and treatment. ...

...DNA sequencing began at academic research centers in the 1970s, and the original Human Genome Project successfully sequenced the first genome in 2001 and cost roughly $1 billion.

Since then, the field has accelerated. In the last four to five years, the cost of sequencing has been falling at a rate of tenfold annually, according to George M. Church, a Harvard geneticist. In a recent presentation in Los Angeles, Dr. Church said he expected the industry to stay on that curve, or some fraction of that improvement rate, for the foreseeable future. At least 17 startup and existing companies are in the sequencing race, pursuing a range of third-generation technologies. Sequencing the human genome now costs $5,000 to $50,000, although Dr. Church emphasized that none of the efforts so far had been completely successful and no research group had yet sequenced the entire genome of a single individual. ...

...One of the crucial advances needed to improve the quality of DNA analysis is to be able to read longer sequences. Current technology is generally in the range of 30 to 800 nucleotides, while the goal is to be able to read sequences of as long as one million bases, according to Dr. Church, who spoke in July at a forum sponsored by Edge.org, a nonprofit online science forum. ...

[...]

DARWIN'S INTELLECTUAL LEGACY TO THE 21ST CENTURY

Speakers: Leda Cosmides, Helena Cronin, Daniel C. Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, Ian McEwan, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, John Tooby, Alvaro Fischer (Program Director)

Leda Cosmides

Helena Cronin

Daniel C. Dennett

Nicholas Humphrey

Ian McEwan

Steven Pinker

Matt Ridley

John Tooby

Date: September 7-8, 2009
Venue: CasaPiedra
Av. San José María Escrivá de Balaguer 5600, Vitacura, Santiago.

Charles Darwin, on the second trip of HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy, wrote in his field notebook in 1833, "many glaciers beryl blue most beautiful contrasted with snow". [...] [...] [...] [...].

From the Program Notes: Our intention is to illuminate and discuss how Darwinian thought influenced the disciplines that focus on the study the individuals (biology, neuroscience, psychology); the individual within their social interactions (anthropology, sociology, economy, political science); and how these concepts pertain, in general, to a moral philosophy.

We wish to explore how, from Darwinian thought, there emerges a vision of what it is to be a human being. And that this vision is fundamental and coherent with the entire body of accumulated scientific knowledge. With reverence for the details of their application, it is the impact of Darwin's ideas that is the reason we are celebrating Darwin's anniversary.

Edge looks forward to publishing video highlights of the trip as part of our celebration the three hundredth edition of Edge, later in September. — JB

WHY CHILE?

By Alvaro Fischer (Program Director)

Chile played a very important role in Darwin's life and in his theory's development. This is a fact unknown to many, even in Chile. This role can be illustrated by three excerpts from his life:

To begin with, Darwin's trip around the world in the HMS Beagle (December 1831 – October 1836) was crucial for establishing his theory. The journey's purpose, under Captain Fitz Roy's command, was carrying out hydrographic surveys to improve the existing nautical charts of South America's southern tip, basically Argentinean and Chilean territories. Great Britain, as the ruling world power of the time, required control of the oceans in order to develop its sea trade. As a result of this, Darwin stayed in Chile for approximately one third of the journey's duration, as the expedition's naturalist. He traveled from Tierra del Fuego and the Magellan Strait up through Chiloé, Valdivia, Concepción, Valparaíso and Santiago. He then crossed the Andes Mountains to Mendoza and traveled by land from Valparaíso to Copiapó, among many other places. Also, this is the reason why one third of the chapters of his book "A Naturalist Around the World" are about his travels in Chile. The Beagle's journey allowed Darwin to undergo the profound and extended meditation that led him to his theory of evolution by means of natural selection, and a third of that process took place in Chile. ...

[...]

WE ARE AS GODS AND HAVE TO GET GOOD AT IT [8.20.09]
Stewart Brand Talks About His Ecopragmatist Manifesto

The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it's a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn't happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It's not just perspective. It's actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don't have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that.

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 (forthcoming, October 15th.)

Stewart Brand's Edge Bio Page

[...]

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
15. August 2009
FEUILLETON

GENETIC ENGINEERING

THE CURRENT CATALOG OF LIFE
[Der Aktuelle Katalog Der Schöpfung Ist Da]
By Ed Regis

[ED. NOTE: Among the attendees of the recent Edge Master Class 2009 — A Short Course on Synthetic Genomics, was science writer Ed Regis (What Is Life?) who was commissioned by Frank Schirrmacher, Co-Publisher and Feuilleton Editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to write a report covering the event. A German translation of Regis's article was published on August 15th by FAZ along with an accompanying article. The original English language version is published below with permission.]

GENETIC ENGINEERING

THE CURRENT CATALOG OF LIFE
By Ed Regis

In their futuristic workshops, the masters of the Synthetic Genomics, Craig Venter and George Church, play out their visions of bacteria reprogrammed to turn coal into methane gas and other microbes programmed to create jet fuel

14. August 2009 — John Brockman is a New York City literary agent with a twist: not only does he represent many of the world's top scientists and science writers, he's also founder and head of the Edge Foundation (www.edge.org), devoted to disseminating news of the latest advances in cutting-edge science and technology. Over the weekend of 24-26 July, in Los Angeles, Brockman's foundation sponsored a "master class" in which two of these same scientists — George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and Craig Venter, who helped sequence the human genome — gave a set of lectures on the subject of synthetic genomics. The event, which was by invitation only, was attended by about twenty members of America's technological elite, including Larry Page, co-founder of Google; Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft; and Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and head of SpaceX, a private rocket manufacturing and space exploration firm which is housed in a massive hangar-like structure near Los Angeles International Airport. The first day's session, in fact, was held on the premises of SpaceX, where the Tesla electric car is also built.

Synthetic genomics, the subject of the conference, is the process of replacing all or part of an organism's natural DNA with synthetic DNA designed by humans. It is essentially genetic engineering on a mass scale. As the participants were to learn over the next two days, synthetic genomics will make possible a variety of miracles, such as bacteria reprogrammed to turn coal into methane gas and other microbes programmed to churn out jet fuel. Still other genomic engineering techniques will allow scientists to resurrect a range of extinct creatures including the woolly mammoth and, just maybe, even Neanderthal man.

The specter of "biohackers" creating new infectious agents made its obligatory appearance, but synthetic genomic researchers are, almost of necessity, optimists. George Church, one of whose special topics was "Engineering Humans 2.0," told the group that "DNA is excellent programmable matter." Just as automated sequencing machines can read the natural order of a DNA molecule, automated DNA synthesizing machines can create stretches of deliberately engineered DNA that can then be placed inside a cell so as to modify its normal behavior. Many bacterial cells, for example, are naturally attracted to cancerous tumors. And so by means of correctly altering their genomes it is possible to make a species of cancer-killing bacteria, organisms that attack the tumor by invading its cancerous cells, and then, while still inside them, synthesizing and then releasing cancer-killing toxins.

Church and his Harvard lab team have already programmed bacteria to perform each of these functions separately, but they have not yet connected them all together into a complete and organized system. Still, "we're getting to the point where we can program these cells almost as if they were computers," he said.

But tumor-killing microbes were only a small portion of the myriad wonders described by Church. Another was the prospect of "humanized" or — even "personalized" — mice. These are mammals whose genomes are injected with bits of human DNA for the purpose of getting the animals to produce disease-fighting antibodies that would not be rejected by humans. A personalized mouse, whose genome was modified with some of your very own genetic material, would produce antibodies that would not be rejected by your own body.

Beyond that is the possibility of creating synthetic organisms that would be resistant to a whole class of natural viruses. There are two ways of doing this, one of which involves creating DNA that is a mirror-image of natural DNA. Like many biological and chemical substances, DNA has a chirality or handedness, the property of existing in either left-handed or right-handed structural forms. In their natural state, most biological molecules including DNA and viruses are left-handed. But by artificially constructing right-handed DNA, it would be possible to make synthetic living organisms whose DNA is a mirror-image of the original. They would be resistant to conventional enzymes, parasites, and predators because their DNA would not be recognized by the mirror-image version. Such synthetic organisms would constitute a whole new "mirror-world" of living things.

Church is also founder and head of the Personal Genome Project, or PGP. The project's purpose, he said, is to sequence the genomes of 100,000 volunteers with the goal of opening up a new era of personalized medicine. Instead of today's standardized, one-size-fits-all collection of pills and therapies, the medicine of the future will be genomically tailored to each individual patient, and its treatments will fit him or her as well as a made-to-order suit of clothes. Church also speculated that knowledge of the idiosyncratic features that lurk deep within each of our genomes — genetic differences that give rise to every person's respective set of individuating traits — will bring us an unprecedented level of self-understanding, and, therefore, will allow us to chart a more intelligent and informed course through life.

Toward the end of the first day Elon Musk, for whom the word charismatic could have well been coined, described a genomic transformation of another type. While a video of his Falcon 1 rocket being launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific played in the background, Musk spoke about sending the human species to the planets. That might have seemed an unrealistic goal were it not for the fact that on 13 July, just twelve days prior to the Edge event, SpaceX had successfully launched another Falcon 1 rocket that had placed Malaysia's RazakSAT into Earth orbit. Earlier, competing against both Boeing and Lockheed, SpaceX had won NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition to resupply cargo to the International Space Station.

Then, like an emperor leading his subjects, Musk gave the conference attendees a tour of his spacecraft manufacturing facility. We saw the rocket engine assembly area, several launch vehicle components under construction, the mission operations area, and an example of the company's Dragon spacecraft, a pressurized capsule for the transport of cargo or passengers to the ISS.

"This is all geared to extending life beyond earth to a multiplanet civilization," Musk said of the spacecraft. Suddenly, his particular version of the future was no longer so unbelievable.

The leadoff speaker on the second and last day of the conference was J. Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer who more recently cofounded Synthetic Genomics Inc., an organization devoted to commercializing genomic engineering technologies. One of the challenges of synthetic genomics was to pare down organisms to the minimal set of genes needed to support life. Venter called this "reductionist biology," and said that a fundamental question was whether it would be possible to reconstruct life by putting together a collection of its smallest components.

Brewer's yeast, Venter discovered, could assemble fragments of DNA into functional chromosomes. He described a set of experiments in which he and colleagues created 25 small synthetic pieces of DNA, injected them into a yeast cell, which then proceeded to assemble the pieces into a chromosome. The trick was to design the DNA segments in such a way that the organism puts them together in the correct order. It was easy to manipulate genes in yeast, Venter found. He could insert genes, remove genes, and create a new species with new characteristics. In August 2007, he actually changed one species into another. He took a chromosome from one cell and put it into different one. "Changing the software [the DNA] completely eliminated the old organism and created a new one," Venter said.

Separately, Venter and his group had also created a synthetic DNA copy of the phiX virus, a small microbe that was not infectious to humans. When they put the synthetic DNA into an E. coli bacterium, the cell made the necessary proteins and assembled them into the actual virus, which in turn killed the cell that made it. All of this happened automatically in the cell, Venter said: "The software builds its own hardware."

These and other genomic creations, transformations, and destructions gave rise to questions about safety, the canonical nightmare being genomically engineered bacteria escaping from the lab and wreaking havoc upon human, animal, and plant. But a possible defense against this, Venter said, was to provide the organism with "suicide genes," meaning that you create within them a chemical dependency so that they cannot survive outside the lab. Equipped with such a dependency, synthetic organisms would pose no threat to natural organisms or to the biosphere. Outside the lab they would simply die.

That would be good news if it were true, because with funding provided by ExxonMobil, Venter and his team are now building a three to five square-mile algae farm in which reprogrammed algae will produce biofuels.

"Making algae make oil is not hard," Venter said. "It's the scalability that's the problem." Algae farms of the size required for organisms to become efficient and realistic sources of energy are expensive. Still, algae has the advantage that it uses CO2 as a carbon source — it actually consumes and metabolizes a greenhouse gas — and uses sunlight as an energy source. So what we have here, potentially, are living solar cells that eat carbon dioxide as they produce new hydrocarbons for fuel.

George Church had the final say in a lecture entitled "Engineering Humans 2.0." Human beings, he noted, are limited by a variety of things: by their ability to concentrate and remember, by the shortness of their lifespans, and so on. Genomic engineering could be used to correct all these deficiencies and more. The common laboratory mouse, he noted, had an average lifespan of 2.5 years. The naked mole rate, by contrast, lives ten times longer, to the ripe old age of 25. It would be possible to find the genes that contributed to the longevity of the naked mole rat, and by importing those genes into the lab mouse, you could slowly increase its longevity.

An analogous process could also be tried on human beings, increasing their lifespans and adding to their memory capacity, but the question was whether it was wise to do this. There were always trade-offs, Church said. You may engineer humans to have bigger and stronger bones, but only at the price if making them heavier and more ungainly. Malaria resistance is coupled with increased susceptibility to sickle cell anemia. And so on down the list. In a conference characterized by an excess of excess, Church provided a welcome cautionary note.

But then he proceeded to pull out all the stops an argued that by targeted genetic manipulation of the elephant genome it might be possible to resurrect the woolly mammoth. And by doing the same to the chimpanzee genome, scientists could possibly resurrect Neanderthal man.

"Why would anyone want to resurrect Neanderthal man?" a conference participant asked.

"To create a sibling species that would give us a fresh outlook on ourselves," Church answered. Humans were a monoculture, he said, and monocultures were biologically at risk.

His answer did not satisfy all of those present. "We already have enough Neanderthals in Washington," Craig Venter quipped, thereby effectively bringing the Edge Master Class 2009 to a close.

Ed Regis is the author of several science books, most recently, What Is Life? Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

[Permalink]

THE WALKMAN OF GENETIC ENGINEERING: THE MOVE FROM SCIENCE TO A NEW WORLD OF PRODUCTS

[Walkman der Gentechnik; Der Schritt von der Wissenschaft zu einer neuen Warenwelt]

By Andrian Kreye, Editor, The Feuilleton, Sueddeutsche Zeitung

...Genetic engineering is now at a point where computer science was around the mid-eighties. The early PCs were limited as to purpose and network. In two and a half decades, the computer has led us into a digial world in which every aspect of lives has been affected. According to Moore's Law, the performance of computers doubles every 18 months. Genetic engineering is following a similar growth. On the last weekend in July, Craig Venter and George Church met in Los Angeles to lead a seminar on synthetic genetic engineering for John Brockman's science forum Edge.org.

Genetic engineering under Church has been following the grwoth of computer science growing by a factor of tenfold per year. After all, the cost of sequencing a genome dropped from three billion dollars in 2000 to around $50 000 dollars as Stanford University's Dr. Steven Quake genomics engineer announced this week. 17 commercial companies already offer similar services. In June, a "Consumer Genetics" exhibition was held in Boston for the first time. The Vice President of Knome, Ari Kiirikki, assumes that the cost of sequencing a genome in the next ten years will fall to less than $1,000. In support for this development, the X-Prize Foundation has put up a prize of ten million dollars for the sequencing of 100 full genomes within ten days for the cost of less than $10,000 dollars per genome sequenced.

It is now up to the companies themselves to provide an ethical and legal standing to commercial genetic engineering. The States of New York and California have already made the sale of genetic tests subject to a prescription. This is however only a first step is to adjust a new a new commercialized science which is about to cause enormous changes similar to those brought about be computer science. Medical benefits are likely to be enormous. Who knows about dangers in its genetic make-up, can preventive measures meet. The potential for abuse is however likewise given. Health insurances and employers could discriminate against with the DNS information humans. Above all however our self-understanding will change. Which could change, if synthetic genetic engineering becomes a mass market, is not yet foreseeable. For example, Craig Venter is working on synthetic biofuels. If successful, such a development would re-align technology, economics and politics in a fundamental way. Of one thing we can already be certain. The question of whether genetic engineering will becomes available for all is no longer on the table. It has already happened.

HEUTE IN DEN FEUILLETONS

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13.08.2009

Von aktuellen Entwicklungen aus der schönen neuen Welt der Genom-Sequenzierung berichtet Andrian Kreye: "Am letzten Juliwochenende trafen sich Craig Venter und George Church in Los Angeles, um für John Brockmans Wissenschaftsforum Edge.org ein Seminar über synthetische Gentechnik zu leiten. Die Gentechnik, so Church, habe die Informatik dabei längst hinter sich gelassen und entwickle sich mit einem Faktor von zehn pro Jahr. Immerhin - der Preis für die Sequenzierung eines Genoms ist von drei Milliarden Dollar im Jahr 2000 auf rund 50.000 Dollar gefallen, wie der Ingenieur der Stanford University Dr. Steven Quake diese Woche bekanntgab. 17 kommerzielle Firmen bieten ihre Dienste schon an."

[ED NOTE: Two years ago Edge published Freeman Dyson's essay "Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society" [8.8.07]. In it he wrote:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

The conversation around Dyson's "heretical" ideas has continued, and most recently he was the subject of a critical cover story in The New York Times Magazine. On August 14th he appeared on Charlie Rose to talk about global warming, origins of life, why he believes in belief. ... — JB]

CHARLIE ROSE
August 14, 2009

A conversation with theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson

CHARLIE ROSE: Freeman Dyson is here. He has spent a lifetime grappling with some of the toughest problems in science and beyond. As a young physicist, he achieved worldwide recognition by merging three competing theories of quantum physics. Dyson has since become a best- selling author on topics from biotechnology to extraterrestrial
intelligence.

In recent years, he has emerged as a critic of climate change. In March, "The New York Times" profiled him in an article called, "The Globing Warming Heretic." The piece asked, "How did Freeman Dyson, revered scientist, liberal intellectual, problem solver, wind up infuriating the environmentalists?"

We'll ask that and more. I'm pleased to have Freeman Dyson back at this table. Welcome.

FREEMAN DYSON: Thank you.

CHARLIE ROSE: I'll get to this in a moment, but you really stirred them up when you talked about global warming, don't you?

FREEMAN DYSON: So, that article, of course, is totally misleading. Global warming is a very small part of my concern. ...

[...]

[ED. NOTE: It's summer, you're kicking back, relaxing on the beach, kayaking off the coast, desperately trying to finish your book before September, and you check your iPhone and find this email with a link to a 27,200-word edition of Edge. "This is too long", you think. "Come on Edge, it's the Web: cut it down, make it pithy. Why do I want to read long, thoughtful pieces when I can make do with a couple of screens and then jump to the next link? And, by the way, where are the links in these pieces? Who needs original work when I can be a part of the link economy? Edge, you must be joking. Nobody reads this way anymore."

Or do they? — JB]

[...]

AMAZING BABIES [8.11.09]
A Talk with Alison Gopnik

We've known for a long time that human children are the best learning machines in the universe. But it has always been like the mystery of the humming birds. We know that they fly, but we don't know how they can possibly do it. We could say that babies learn, but we didn't know how.

ALISON GOPNIK, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley, is coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn, and author of The Philosophical Baby.

Alison Gopnik's Edge Bio Page

[...]

ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE [8.11.09]
By Douglas Rushkoff

An Edge Original Essay

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is a media analyst; documentary filmmaker, and author. His latest book is Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.

Doulgas Rushkoff's Edge Bio Page

GEORGE DYSON
Science Historian; Darwin Among the Machines

...How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don't let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don't call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind. ...

[...]

Money is human happiness in the abstract, wrote Schopenhauer grimly in the early 19th Century. He then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. ... But what is happiness? ...

MONEY, DESIRE, PLEASURE, PAIN [8.7.09]
By Emanuel Derman

An Edge Original Essay

EMANUEL DERMAN is a professor in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. His is the author of My Life As A Quant.

Emanuel Derman's Edge Bio page

Since Descartes invested the Western mind with res cogitans and res extensa, the seemingly insurmountable philosophic and scientific questions his dualism posed have stalked us. Indeed, a friendly observer of the past 350 years of the philosophy of mind might be forgiven for saying that res cogitans and res extensa, despite all our efforts with Dualism, Materialism, Idealism, and now the Mind Brain Identity Theory, have held us at bay. I say 'at bay' because it is clear that there is no agreement that we have solved the mighty problems of consciousness and mind.

FIVE PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
By Stuart A. Kauffman [8.7.09]

An Edge Original Essay

STUART A. KAUFFMAN is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy. He is the author of Reinventing the Sacred, The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization, and Investigations.

Stuart A. Kauffman's Edge Bio Page

[...]

THE NEW YORK TIMES — TIERNEY LAB
August 3, 2009, 8:00 AM

Synthetic Life
By JOHN MARKOFF

There is a growing consensus (at least in Silicon Valley) that the information age is about to give way to the era of synthetic genetics. That was underscored recently when Harvard geneticist George Church and J. Craig Venter — of the race to decode the human genome fame — gave lectures before a small group of scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and writers in West Hollywood.

The event, billed as "A Short Course on Synthetic Genetics", was organized by John Brockman, the literary impresario (and book agent for several New York Times reporters, including this one) who publishes the cybersalon-style website www.edge.org, a forum dedicated to scientists (many of whom are his clients) and their ideas.

In roughly six hours of lectures both scientists tried to convey how the world will be changed by the ability to routinely read genetic sequences into computing systems and then store, replicate, alter and insert them back into living cells.

The rate at which this technology is now improving puts silicon to shame. Dr. Church noted that between 1970 and 2005 gene sequencing had taken place on a Moore's Law pace, improving at about 1.5 times per year. Since then it has improved at the rate of an order of magnitude, or ten times annually.

In the process the cost of sequencing the human genome has plunged from $3 billion to $5 thousand and continues to fall. Dr. Church identified 17 companies and one "open source" project all pursuing different technologies to further push down cost and speed up the pace of sequencing.

As a consequence, the structure of the emerging synthetic genetics industry is beginning to mirror that of the semiconductor and computer industries, which are based on modular components and design tools.

The key to the vast growth of the computer industry took place during the 1970s when physicist Carver Mead helped give the industry a standard design approach based on modular components. Now that appears to be happening in the synthetic biology world as well.

For someone who has spent the past three decades writing about computing, Dr. Venter's talk was eye-opening.

"I view DNA as an analog information system," he said. " and I hope to convince you in fact that it is absolutely the software of life."

[...]

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
August 13, 2009

When Science & Poetry Were Friends
By Freeman Dyson

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
Pantheon, 552 pp., $40.00

...If the new Romantic Age is real, it will be centered on biology and computers, as the old one was centered on chemistry and poetry. Candidates for leadership of the modern Romantic Age are the biology wizards Kary Mullis, Dean Kamen, and Craig Venter, and the computer wizards Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Charles Simonyi. Craig Venter is the entrepreneur who taught the world how to read genomes fast; Kary Mullis is the surfer who taught the world how to multiply genomes fast; Dean Kamen is the medical engineer who taught the world how to make artificial hands that really work.

Each achievement of our modern pioneers resonates with echoes from the past. Venter sailed around the world on his yacht collecting genomes of microbes from the ocean and sequencing them wholesale, like Banks who sailed around the world collecting plants. Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, which allows biologists to multiply a single molecule of DNA into a bucketful of identical molecules within a few hours, and after that spent most of his time surfing the beaches of California, like Davy who invented the miners' lamp and after that spent much of his time fly-fishing along the rivers of Scotland.

Dean Kamen builds linkages between living human brains and mechanical fingers and thumbs, like Victor Frankenstein, who sewed dead brains and hands together and brought them to life. Page and Brin built the giant Google search engine that reaches out to the furthest limits of human knowledge, like William Herschel, who built his giant forty-foot telescope to reach out to the limits of the universe. Simonyi was chief architect of software systems for Microsoft and later flew twice as a cosmonaut on the International Space Station, like the intrepid aeronauts Blanchard and Jeffries, who made the first aerial voyage from England to France by balloon in 1795. ...

... If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is still struggling to be born. It must struggle against cultural barriers as well as technical difficulties, against the myth of Frankenstein as well as the reality of genetic defects and deformities.

If this dream comes true, and the new art form emerges triumphant, then a new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses, might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds to enrich the ecology of our planet. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder. The new Age of Wonder might bring together wealthy entrepreneurs like Venter and Kamen, academic professionals like Haussler, and a worldwide community of gardeners and farmers and breeders, working together to make the planet beautiful as well as fertile, hospitable to hummingbirds as well as to humans.

[...]

On July 24, 2009, a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs, cultural impresarios and journalists that included architects of the some of the leading transformative companies of our time (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PayPal), arrived at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, to be offered a glimpse, guided by George Church and Craig Venter, of a future far stranger than Mr. Huxley had been able to imagine in 1948.

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made. ...

— George Dyson, from The Introduction

A SHORT COURSE ON SYNTHETIC GENOMICS [7.30.09]
George Church & J. Craig Venter

Edge Master Class 2009
George Church & J. Craig Venter
The Andaz, Los Angeles, CA, July 24-6, 2009

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

GEORGE CHURCH, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director, Center for Computational Genetics, and Science Advisor to 23 and Me, and J. CRAIG VENTER, Founder of Synthetic Genomics, Inc. and President of the J. Craig Venter Institute and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, taught the Edge Master Class 2009: "A Short Course In Synthetic Genomics" at The Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, the weekend of July 24th-26th. On Saturday the 25th the class traveled by bus to Space X near LAX, where Sessions 1-4 were taught by George Church. On Sunday, the Class was held at The Andaz in West Hollywood. Craig Venter taught Session 5 and George Church taught Session 6. The topics covered over the course of a rigorous 11-hour progam of six lectures included:

What is life, origins of life, in vitro synthetic life, mirror-life, metabolic engineering for hydrocarbons & pharmaceuticals, computational tools, electronic-biological interfaces, nanotech-molecular-manufacturing, biosensors, accelerated lab evolution, engineered personal stem cells, multi-virus-resistant cells, humanized-mice, bringing back extinct species, safety/security policy.

The entire Master Class is available in high quality HD Edge Video (about 6 hours).

The Edge Master Class 2009 advanced the themes and ideas presented in the historic Edge meeting "Life: What A Concept!" in August 2007.

___

Further Reading on Edge:
Constructive Biology: A Talk With George Church [6.26.06]
Life: A Gene-Centric View Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich (Moderator: John Brockman) [1.21.08]

George Church	Craig Venter
Nassim Taleb	Nathan Myhrvold, Larry Page
Tim O'Reilly	Richard Thaler
Sean Parker, Thomas Kalil	Ari Emanuel, Jesse Dylan, Maria Spiropulu [MORE]

Charles II had the right idea. He trusted (and endowed) the small group of oddballs who were forming the Royal Society, and put a stop on the Exchequer. If he had rescued the bankers, and ignored William Petty’s band of Natural Philosophers, where would we be now?

THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC MISBEHAVIOR [7.27.09]
By George Dyson

An Edge Original Essay

Introduction

Is the economy really as bad as it seems? Is the bad economy as real as we think? Expanding upon last year's essay Economic Dis-Equilibrium, George Dyson takes another look back at how we got into the state we're in — and how to find our way out.

— JB

GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author of Baidarka; Project Orion; and Darwin Among the Machines.

Further Reading. George Dyson on Edge: Turing's Cathedral; The Universal Library; Economic Dis-Equilibrium; Darwin Among The Machines; Or, The Origins Of [Artificial] Life

George Dyson's Edge Bio page

In the 6 million years since hominids split from the evolutionary ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos, something happened to our brains that allowed us to become master cooperators, accumulate knowledge at a rapid rate, and manipulate tools to colonize almost every corner of the planet.

OUT OF OUR MINDS: HOW DID HUMANS COME DOWN FROM THE TREES AND WHY DID NO ONE FOLLOW? [7.17.09]
By Vanessa Woods & Brian Hare

VANESSA WOODS, author of It's Every Monkey for Themselves, is an award-winning journalist who has a double degree in biology and English from the University of New South Wales. She is a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group and studies the psychology of bonobos and chimpanzees in Africa. Vanessa Woods's Edge Bio Page

BRIAN HARE is an anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy at Duke University. His research centers on human cognitive evolution, and his experience in the field includes work in Siberia, the jungle of Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Brian Hare's Edge Bio Page

From WHAT'S NEXT?
Dispatches on the Future of Science
Edited By Max Brockman

When I started out in '84/'85, intent on studying the genomes of ancient civilizations, I was, as is often the case in this kind of situation, driven by delusions of grandeur. I thought that I would be able to easily study the ancient genomes. I dreamt of addressing questions in Egyptology. For example, how do historico-political events that we read about impact the population? When Alexander the Great comes to Egypt, what is the influence on the population? Is it just a political change? The Arab Conquest: does that mean that a large part of the population is replaced? Or is it mainly a cultural change? There's no way we can answer this question from historical records. But my dream was to address questions like this. Then, after some initial success, I realized the real limitations on what I wanted to do.

MAPPING THE NEANDERTHAL GENOME [7.4.09]
A Conversation with Svante Pääbo

SVANTE PÄÄBO, the founder of the field of ancient DNA, is Director, Department of Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. In 2007 Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Svante Pääbo's Edge Bio Page

THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW [6.29.09]
A Conversation with Gavin Schmidt

Introduction

There is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100% accuracy. First, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 13 billion years.

But if you want something useful right now, if you want to construct a means of taking the knowledge that we have and use it to predict future climate, you build computer simulations. Your models are messy, complicated, in constant need of fine tuning, exacting and inexact at the same time. You're using the past to predict the future, extrapolating the very complicated from the very simple, and relying on an ever-changing data stream to inform the outcome.

Climatologist Gavin Schmidt explains:

How do you ask questions about expectations in the future? Obviously, you have to have things that are based on the physics that we know. You have to have things that are based on processes we can go and measure, that has to be based on our ability to understand the climate that we have now. Why do you get seasonal cycles? Why do you get storms? What controls the frequency of these events over a winter, over a longer period? What controls the frequency of, say, El Nino events in the tropical Pacific that have impacts on rainfall in California or in Peru or in Indonesia? How do you understand all of those things?

We approach this is in a very ambitious way.

What we have decided, as a scientific endeavor, is to extrapolate as much as we can from our knowledge of the individual processes that we can measure: evaporation from the ocean, the formation of a cloud, rainfall coming from a cloud, changes in the wind patterns as a function of the pressure field, changes in the jet stream. What we have tried to do is encapsulate those small-scale processes, put them altogether, and see if we can predict the emerging properties of that fundamental complex system.

— Russell Weinberger

GAVIN SCHMIDT is a climatologist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, where he models past, present, and future climate. His essay "Why Hasn't Specialization Led To The Balkanization Of Science?" in included in What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited By Max Brockman

Gavin Schmidt's Edge Bio Page

BRAIN TIME [6.24.09]
By David M. Eagleman

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

DAVID M. EAGLEMAN is director of Baylor College of Medicine's Laboratory for Perception and Action at Oxford University, whose long-range goal is to understand the neural mechanisms of time perception. He also directs BCM's Initiative on Law, Brains, and Behavior, which seeks to determine how new discoveries in neuroscience will change our laws and criminal justice system. He is the author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

David M. Eagleman's Edge Bio Page

From WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science Edited By Max Brockman

We discovered a new vein of research — the relation between physical and social or psychological concepts — that we came to by taking evolutionary principles seriously and applying them to psychology. We weren't using evolutionary psychology, which has largely been focused on mating and reproduction. Our focus, rather, was in terms of evolutionary biology and the basic principles of natural selection: and that field makes clear that humans must have had these kinds of mechanisms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness.

THE SIMPLIFIER
A Conversation with John A. Bargh

Introduction

"They say that in science there are complicators and there are simplifiers," says John Bargh, Yale social psychologist known for his early work on the topic of automaticity, and more recently for bringing experimental methodology to the philosophical question of free will.

According to Bargh, the tension between the complicators and the simplifiers is a good thing in any field of ideas or science. "I've always been a simplifier." he says, "looking for the simple mechanisms that produce complex effect, instead of building a complicated model. Once we find one of these veins — one of these avenues of research — we just go for it and mine it and mine it until we run out of gold.

Bargh's lines of research all focus on unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments. That each of these basic psychological phenomena occur without the person's intention and awareness, yet have such strong effects on the person's decisions and behavior, has considerable implications for philosophical matters such as free will, and the nature and purpose of consciousness itself.

He maintains that the resulting findings "are very consistent and in harmony with evolutionary biology. And this is very unlike psychology, which has always presumed a kind of consciousness bottle-neck or a self, some kind of a homunculus type of self sitting there, making all the decisions and deciding without any explanation of where they comes from or what's causing the self or what's causing the conscious choices. Emphasizing what our unconscious systems do for us, in turn, links us very strongly to other organisms and other animals very closely. Recent primate research is showing that primates are closer to us than we thought. They fall for the same kind of economic fallacies that Kahneman and Tversky talked about in humans 30 years ago."

— Russell Weinberger
Associate Publisher, Edge

JOHN A. BARGH is professor of social psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation) Lab.

John Bargh's Edge Bio Page

Does language shape our thinking?

An essay on how language influences thought from the pop-science anthology "What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science" has been posted on The Edge. Author Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford, writes:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

She brings up experiments and other examples involving use of language and direction, time, color and gender, all of which seem to demonstrate that yes, language shapes how we think.

But my favorite is this example above. Only a linguist — or perhaps a social scientist — would put Chomsky in a hypothetical.

— Carolyn Kellogg

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? [6.11.09]
By Lera Boroditsky

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY [6.4.09]
By Don Tapscott

Introduction

In his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky noted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV."

In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era:

For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.

Benkler believes that these "phenomena on the Net are not ephemeral". And he has spent the last 20 years trying to get his head around the process of understanding what is transpiring.

In a Reality Club discussion "On 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' By Nicholas Carr" W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff and others explored the future of the printed book.

And Shirky, in his recent piece "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable", (with comments from Nicholas Carr, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, Marc Frons) wrote:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Enter Don Tapscott, who is looking at the challenges the digital revolution poses to the fundamental aspects of the University.

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning", he writes. "There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn."

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Contrary to Nicholas Carr's proposition that Google is making us stupid, Tapscott counters with the following:

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They're used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What's more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

This is a topic that is worthy of a serious conversation by the Edge community and I hope to present comments from contributors in future Edge editions.

— John Brockman

DON TAPSCOTT is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Don Tapscott's Edge Bio Page

If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night. — Daniel Gilbert

WHAT'S NEXT? [5.26.09]
Dispatches on the Future of Science
Edited By Max Brockman

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years." — Steven Pinker

[ED. NOTE: What are "the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night?" Beginning today with Laurence Smith's "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim", and in the coming weeks, Edge will publish a selection of the essays in Max Brockman's book What's Next: Dispatches On the Future of Science, published today by Vintage Books. —JB]

WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM? [5.27.09]
By Laurence C. Smith

Already the impacts are obvious in the extreme north, where melting Arctic sea ice, drowning polar bears, and forlorn Inuit hunters are by now iconic images of global warming. The rapidity and severity of Arctic warming is truly dramatic. However, the Arctic, a relatively small, thinly populated region, will always be marginal in terms of its raw social and economic impact on the rest of us. The greater story lies to the south, penetrating deeply into the "Northern Rim," a vast zone of economically significant territory and adjacent ocean owned by the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. As in the Arctic, climate change there has already begun. This zone — which constitutes almost 30 percent of the Earth's land area and is home to its largest remaining forests, its greatest untouched mineral, water, and energy reserves, and a (growing) population of almost 100 million people — will undergo one of the most profound biophysical and social expansions of this century.

Laurence C. Smith is Professor and vice chairman of geography and professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA. He studies likely impacts of northern climate change including the economic effects in the Northern Rim.

Laurence C. Smith's Edge Bio Page

The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old brain-body, mind-body problem, and we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE [5.21.09]
A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer

INTRODUCTION

"I always thought of myself as a scientist," says Jonah Lehrer "and then I had the privilege of working for several years in the lab of Eric Kandel as a technician, doing the manual labor of science, and what I discovered there was that I was a terrible scientist. As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it." But there are many ways to contribute to the conversation that is science, and Lehrer is making important contributions as a writer who has internalized the process of the scientific method in asking interesting questions about ourselves and the world around us.

"Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves," he says. "But how can we take that same rigor, which has made this research so valuable and, at the same time, make it a more realistic representation of what it's actually like to be a human. After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures."

"You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It's the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It's the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what's actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What's triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large. " Read on...

— John Brockman

JONAH LEHRER, Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

Jonah Lehrer's Edge Bio Page

The Third Culture has grown beyond Edge, as scientists have become increasingly public — and even famous  — figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing.

SEED CELEBRATES THE QUESTIONS C.P. SNOW RAISED 50 YEARS AGO BY ASKING: WHERE ARE WE NOW? [5.21.09]

Introduction

"Are we beyond the Two Cultures?" asks Seed Magazine in its May 7 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Readers following Edge since it began 12 years, 285 editions, and 2,939,953 words ago, know how to answer this question. Fortunately, Seed follows up and asks "Where are we now?"

It's been clear for several years that the third culture I predicted I fifteen years earlier has been in need of an update. "There are encouraging signs," I wrote in "The Expanding Third Culture" (2006), "that the third culture includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges. They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics—a whole panoply of humanist concerns—need to take the sciences into account."

Seed has played in this field of ideas, creating their own kind of culture, one that embraces artists, architects, novelists designers, musicians, etc., presenting their work in vibrant and imaginative ways.

In the videos below, Seed asks six notable scientists, authors, thinkers (all also early Edge contributors) to comment on where the third culture is today.

— John Brockman

"May 7 marks the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Half a century ago the prominent novelist and speaker, who studied under Lord Rutherford, described a chasm between literary intellectuals and scientists, a gulf that impoverished both sides and impeded efforts to relieve suffering around the world. Science was not understood or respected by the dominant culture, to the detriment of all, he said. At some point scientists had ceased to be considered intellectuals, Snow noted, and though any educated person was required to know Shakespeare, almost none knew the second law of thermodynamics.

"Snow's words touched off decades of debate on both the existence of the "Two Cultures" and the possibility of a "Third Culture" — a group Snow envisioned as curious non-scientists who could bridge the gap between scientists and humanists. In 1991, literary agent John Brockman wrote an essay entitled "The Third Culture," which made the point that "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, his Edge Foundation launched a website  — Edge  — explicitly to bring together intellectuals of the Third Culture — many scientists, but also writers and philosophers—with the goal of bringing empirical studies directly to the public. The Third Culture has grown beyond Edge, as scientists have become increasingly public — and even famous  — figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing."

After all, we are witnessing the Waterloo of Wall Street. So, ironically, it was in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the small town of Waterloo, that a meeting was convened to shed new light on the world's financial debacle. In a densely packed conference schedule, the general approach was to take measure of the crisis not only in a new way, but with instruments never used before. Even the venue for event, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, was itself programmatic, though invitations to participate were sent far beyond the boundaries of economics and physics to mathematicians, lawyers, behavioral economists, risk managers, evolutionary biologists, complexity theorists and computer scientists.— Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

THE ECONOMIC MANHATTAN PROJECT — THE VIDEOS [5.15.09]

Introduction

In December, Edge published "Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?" by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. The paper was prompted by a suggestion by Eric Weinstein for an "Economic Manhattan Project".

This led to the Perimeter Institute conference: "The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics". According to the organizers, "Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research."

Eric Weinstein Nouriel Roubini Richard Freeman Nassim Taleb at Perimeter

The conference began on May 1st, with a day of invited talks by leading experts to a public audience on the status of economic and financial theory in light of the crisis. I was pleased to be invited and to listen to the first day of public talks.

Among those participating were Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Eric Weinstein, introduced by Theoretical Physicist Neil Turok, who recently moved Cambridge to become the Executive Director of Perimeter, and Lee Smolin, a founding member and research physicist. Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute, and one of the original Edge contributors, was also in attendance.

Nassim Taleb at Perimeter: there's too much in the fourth quadrant to clean up.

Eric Weinstein set the stage with a statement on his talk, which began the proceedings:

An unexpected economic crisis provides an excellent opportunity to better understand the state of Economic theory as a science. While there appears to have been a broad systemic failure within the community of professional economists to predict the current collapse, it must be noted that there have been scattered successes which appear striking and demand our attention. The goal of this conference is to bring together economists, biologists, mathematicians, physicists, programmers, and financial professionals to explore the opportunities for bringing economic theory into closer contact with the more traditional sciences as the basis for ongoing work, partnership, and collaboration.

Eric Weinstein: Success is not an option

Jordan Mejias, arts correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and frequent Edge contributor, attended as well. His interesting report ran on the front page of the FAZ Feuilleton.

Jordan Mejias

I am pleased to present the video presentations of Eric Weinstein; Nouriel Roubini; Nassim Taleb, a panel discussion of Eric Weinstein, Nouriel Roubini, Richard Freeman, and Nassim Taleb; Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander; a panel discussion of Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose; and Doyne Farmer.

— John Brockman

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.

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF
C.P. SNOW'S REDE LECTURE,
"THE TWO CULTURES" [5.7.09]

Today, May 7, 2009, marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures". In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. This never happened. Although I borrowed Snow's phrase in my 1991 essay "The Third Culture", it does not describe the third culture he predicted.

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers isn 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. Increasingly, The Third Culture has moved into the mainstream and the questions it is asking are those that inform us about ourselves and the world around us.

I am pleased to honor the memory of C.P. Snow and his "Two Cultures" by presenting "The Third Culture" on Edge, from 1997 to today (2,939,953 words).

John Brockman, Editor

[...continue]

The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. What the world needs to do to prepare.

THE AGE OF PANDEMIC [5.7.09]
By Larry Brilliant

Introduction

John Maddox, who recently stepped down as editor of Nature, occupies a unique place in today's culture. During the past 23 years he managed to build Nature into the premier publication of its kind, while still retaining the respect of the international science community for his intellect and writing.

In this discussion he talks about what we need to be concerned about: the increasing accumulation of data on a huge scale, lack of quantitative progress in biology, infection, impact, cloning, and the stability of the human genome.

— John Brockman

SIR JOHN MADDOX, who served 22 years as the editor of Nature, was a trained physicist, who has served on a number of Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation. His books include Revolution in Biology, The Doomsday Syndrome, Beyond the Energy Crisis, and What Remains to be Discovered: The Agenda for Science in the Next Century.

John Maddox's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

KRAUSSFEST 2009

Lawrence Krauss

The Origins Initiative at ASU, under the leadership of its Director, physicist and Edge contributor Lawrence Krauss, is a University-wide initiative to focus on deep and foundational questions ranging across the entire spectrum of scholarship at ASU. The three-day Origins Symposium explored forefront questions at the edge of knowledge: from the origin of the universe and the laws of nature to the evolution of life, humans, consciousness, and culture. The symposium, which took place April 3-6 and consisted of private scientific seminars and large public lectures, was an intellectual extravaganza, a "Kraussfest", which assembled in one place a group containing the most well known scientific public intellectuals in the world, many of whom are well-known to readers of these pages. The entire program was available globally through a live webcast, and a video archive of the proceedings will soon be online on the Origins Initiative Website.

On the bus with Nobel Laureates David Gross, Wally Gilbert, Frank Wilczek

Among the Edgies at "Kraussfest 2009" were Roger Bingham, Patricia Churchland, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Rebecca Goldstein, A. C. Grayling, Brian Greene, David Gross, Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Lawrence Krauss, John Mather, Randolph Nesse, Steven Pinker, Terrence Senjnowski, Maria Spiropulu, Craig Venter, Alex Vilenkin, Frank Wilczek.

[Proceed to Edge photo album of the event...]

Mathematicians and others are endeavoring to apply insights gleaned from the sciences of complexity to the seemingly intractable problem of understanding the world economy. I have a guess, however, that if this problem can be solved (and that is unlikely in the near future), then it will not be possible to use this knowledge to make money on financial markets. One can make money only if there is real risk based on actual uncertainty, and without uncertainty there is no risk.

THE QUICK BUCK BECOMES QUICKER
By Heinz Pagels

[EDITOR'S NOTE:] Heinz R. Pagels, died on July 23, 1988, in a mountain climbing accident on Pyramid Peak in Aspen, Colorado. A physicist, he was Executive Director of The New York Academy of Sciences, adjunct professor of physics at Rockefeller University, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He was the author of three books: The Cosmic Code, Perfect Symmetry, and Dreams of Reason. He was also a founding member, and, at the time of his death, president of "The Reality Club," which, in 1997, moved to the Web as Edge.

It was before and after Reality Club meetings at the New York Academy of Sciences around 1985-6 that Heinz began to talk about the themes that became central to his 1988 book Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, (Simon & Schuster):

"the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear dynamics and selective systems, the new understanding of chaos, experimental mathematics, the connectionist's ideas, neural networks, and parallel distributive processing". ...

He notes that "the computer, with its ability to manage enormous amounts of data and to simulate reality, provides a new window on that view of nature." In other words new technology equals new perception. He also had interesting insights into how the new sciences of complexity would impact global financial markets. He wrote:

As a new mode of production, the computer creates not only a new class of people struggling for intellectual and social acceptance, but a new way of thinking about knowledge. It will transform the scientific enterprise and bring forth a new worldview.

Given the current global economic meltdown, it's instructive to re-read Pagels. Below, please find the Preface and Chapter 7: "The Quick Buck Becomes Quicker". The Edge Introduction is by Emanuel Derman, a physicist who was at Rockefeller University with Pagels, and went on to become the world's best know "Quant".

— John Brockman

LINK: Edge Dedication: Heinz R. Pagels

INTRODUCTION
By Emanuel Derman

There are dualisms everywhere: mind or matter, literature or pornography, investment or speculation. Just today in the New York Times, David Brooks wondered whether our current economic crisis was due to greed or stupidity, and felt obliged to plump for stupidity.

All of these 'or's are choices between complex mental constructs that merely sound simple or primitive; every 'or' is an attempt to forcibly convert the duality into a unity. But the fact that that we can see (at least) two sides to each of these issues signifies intrinsic complexity. Physicists long ago learned to turn wave or particle into wave and particle and live with it, or at least stop thinking about it for as long as they could keep successfully calculating.

Heinz Pagels' 1998 book The Dreams of Reason tackled the science of complexity and the use of computers to understand complex systems that defy reduction. I met Heinz when I was a colleague in particle physics, the most reductionist of fields, in an office down the hall at The Rockefeller University in the late 1970s. An enthusiastic iconoclast with wide interests, Heinz devoted one chapter to the consequences he foresaw of putting science and computing in the service of banking, finance and trading. He presciently warned about the possibility of uncontrollably complex markets, and of the way in which finance, intended to finance investment and construction, may be tempted to incestuously turn in upon itself to recursively finance merely more financial activities.

— Emanuel Derman

EMANUEL DERMAN is a professor in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. He is the author of My Life As a Quant. He was recently featured in "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street" [3.9.09], a front page New York Times "Science Times" profile by Dennis Overbye.

Emanuel Derman's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Joseph Traub, Jaron Lanier. Lee Smolin

[...continue]

We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with.

THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY [3.31.09]
A Talk With Yochai Benkler

YOCHAI BENKLER is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. He is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Yochai Benkler's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

THE TRADESCANT'S ARK EXPERIMENT
Timothy Taylor

In this Edge Video, archeologist Tim Taylor conducts an experiment about making sense of things.

"There are 43 stones passing amongst you. It's called the Tradescant's Ark Experiment and I've named it in honor of John Tradescant and John Tradescant, Sr. and Jr., father and son, who were collectors of things in the 17th century. They were the exhibitors of the world's first pay-to-view museum and they had a cabinet of curiosities set up in Lambeth, on the Thames, which much later was sold to Elias Ashmole and became the germ of the Ashmolean Museum. Not much of it survives, there are little parts of it in the Ashmolen Museum. What is more important is the intellectual move they made in the catalog, which John Tradescant the younger created and in which he distinguished between 2 types of things, naturalls and artificialls. He divided all the things he collected into those he thought were natural and those that were modified by human hand—what archaelogists today call artifacts."

TIMOTHY TAYLOR teaches in the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK, and conducts research on the later prehistoric societies of southeastern Europe. He has presented BBC archaeology programs and he is the author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, and The Buried Soul.

Timothy Taylor's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
March 22, 2009

Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after life as "the two cultures," coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem to read Snow's book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point appears so evident?

It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," which was later published in book form. Snow's famous lament was that "the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups," consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this "gulf of mutual incomprehension." These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, "is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"...

...Snow's descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he asserts, have "the future in their bones," while "the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist." Scientists, he adds, are morally "the soundest group of intellectuals we have," while literary ethics are more suspect. Literary culture has "temporary periods" of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the fascist proclivities of Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, "Didn't the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?" While Snow says those examples are "not to be taken as representative of all writers," the implication of his partial defense is clear.

Snow's essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis — who called Snow "intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be" — and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling, who nonetheless thought Snow had produced "a book which is mistaken in a very large way indeed." Snow's cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the "possibility of rational discourse."

Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a "third culture" to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are "rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives" and superseding literary artists in their ability to "shape the thoughts of their generation." Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that social scientists could form a "third culture." ...

SOME LIKE IT HOT
Steve Jones

In this Edge Video, biologist Steve Jones talks about genetics as the study of difference, asking how differences get there, why they are there, and how many there are.

"If you look at people who sequence DNA—the original DNA sequences, which is a wonderful piece of work of course—in Watson's own DNA sequence—it's a very platonic view of what life is all about. You take a human being, an exemple, an exemplar, J.D. Watson. You've got his DNA. That's the end of the story.

"But of course it isn't like that. If there wasn't difference, then we wouldn't have genetics. We wouldn't have evolution. We'd all be stuck in the primeval slime. Genetics has moved on to think about difference. Why are people, why are snails, so different from each other?"

STEVE JONES is a biologist; Professor of Genetics at the Galton Laboratory of University College London and well-known television presenter. His most recent books are Coral, and Darwin's Island.

Steve Jones's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE [3.17.08]
By Clay Shirky

CLAY SHIRKY is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology—how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody.

Clay Shirky's Edge Bio page

THE REALITY CLUB: Nicholas Carr, Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viégas

[...continue]

You are a leaf-cutting ant from South America. You will compete against the humans across the aisle in a foraging activity. You're task is to collect as much forage as possible. There's a reason ants are so successful. They're disciplined. They follow a series of rules. The first rule is no talking. Ants can't talk so you can't talk. The second rule is no gestures, facial or otherwise. And to make sure you can't use facial expressions we're going to put a paper bag on your head. The third rule is 'Ant walking'. ...

A COOPERATIVE FORAGING EXPERIMENT—LESSONS FROM ANTS
Seirian Sumner

In this Edge Video, Serian Sumner teaches us a lesson about the social nature of ants. She selects fifteen people in the audience at the Serpentine Gallery in London and tells them to imagine they're ants.

SEIRIAN SUMNER is a research fellow in evolutionary biology at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. Her research focuses on the evolution of sociality—how eusociality evolves and how social behavior is maintained. She has worked with a variety of bees, wasps, and ants from around the world, studying their behavior through observation, experimental manipulation, and molecular analyses, including gene expression. She is especially interested in the origins of sociality and the role of the genome in this major evolutionary transition.

Seirian Sumner's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

In a very pure sense you build the accelerator you need when you know what the question is.

IS THERE A HIGGS?
A Talk With Brian Cox

INTRODUCTION
By Martin Rees

As an astronomer I'm lucky to work in a subject where there is already public interest, and where it's not too difficult to convey the key ideas and new discoveries in a non-technical and accessible way. It's far harder to make particle physics accessible and interesting. Brian Cox is one of the few scientists who succeed in doing this, and I much admire him for it. It's fortunate that he's been willing to devote so much time and effort to 'outreach'—and especially to seize the opportunity to publicise the LHC launch so effectively. Scientists—not just particle physicists—should be grateful to him for raising the profile of 'blue skies' research so engagingly and effective.

—Martin Rees, President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival.

BRIAN COX is a Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the Particle Physics group at the University of Manchester, where he holds a chair in Particle Physics. He works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva. A former rock star, he has become a well-known public communicator of science to the public through highly-regarded television and radio presentations on the BBC and other networks.

Brian Cox's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don't know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck. About human psychology, nothing could be explained in evolutionary terms: we just somehow developed a big brain with its spandrels and all, and that's it.

ART AND HUMAN REALITY [2.24.09]
A Talk With Denis Dutton
Introduction By Steven Pinker

INTRODUCTION
By Steven Pinker

Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.

And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Dutton has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a universal definition of art—something that many theorists assumed was simply impossible. And he has advanced a theory that aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution. His ideas in this area are not meant to be the last word, but they lay out testable hypotheses, and point to many fields that can be brought to bear on our understanding of art.

I see this as part of a larger movement of consilience, in which (to take a few examples), ideas from auditory cognition will provide insight into music, phonology will help illuminate poetics, semantics and pragmatics will advance our understanding of fiction, and moral psychology will be brought to bear on jurisprudence and philosophy. And in his various roles, Denis Dutton will be there when it happens.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, The Stuff of Thought.

~~

DENIS DUTTON, a philosopher, is founder and editor of the highly regarded Web publication, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). He teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, writes widely on aesthetics. and is editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, and the author of the recently published The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.

Denis Dutton's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

JUAN ENRIQUEZ: BEYOND THE CRISIS, MINDBOGGLING SCIENCE AND THE ARRIVAL OF HOMO EVOLUTIS

Even as mega-banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don't look for it on your ballot -- or in the stock exchange. It'll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be ... different.

This year's TED Conference, TED 2009, held in Long Beach and curated by Chris Anderson, offered four intense days interesting presentations of "ideas worth spreading". The "spreading" of these ideas extends far beyond the confines of the conference hall as Anderson has extended his vision to multiple viewing locations as well and by presenting TED conferences in venues such as India, Africa, Oxford, and Europe. And most importantly, he has tapped into the viral nature of the Internet age with the "Ted Talks", videos of the live conference events, which feature superb production quality coupled with elegant web presentation. The combination of interesting speakers, excellent technology and production, and the Internet, makes for a rich experience, free for all.

At TED 2009, one of the highlights was the very first talk, as Juan Enriquez, a frequent Edge contributor, opened the conference with his usual energy. [Click here for Juan Enriquez's TED Talk.]

JUAN ENRIQUEZ is CEO, Biotechonomy; was Founding Director, Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project; Author, The Untied States of America

Juan Enriquez's Edge Bio Page

"John Brockman, a literary agent, is the shadowy figure at the top of the cyberfashion food chain."

—Ted Nelson, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way

Yves Behar, FuseProject; Jeff Bezos, Amazon; Zack Bogue; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Rod Brooks, Robotocist, Heartland Robotics; Geoffrey Carr, The Economist; Steve Case, Revolution Health; Jean Case, Case Foundation; Larry Cohen, Gates Foundation; Keith Coleman, Google G-Mail; Brian Cox, CERN; Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts; Susan Dennett; Peter Diamandis, X-Prize Foundation; Juan Enriquez, Excel Medical Ventures; Tony Fadell, Apple; Peter Gabriel; Bill Gates, Gates Foundation; Saul Griffith, Makani Power; Pati Hillis; Danny Hillis, Applied Minds; Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post; Joi Ito, Creative Commons, Neotony; Bill Joy, Kleiner Perkins; Dean Kamen, Deka Research; Jon Kamen, Radical Media; Mickey Kaus, Slate; Kevin Kelly, kk.org; Danielle Lambert; Jaron Lanier; Steven Levy, Wired; Katinka Matson, edge.org, Brockman, Inc.; Marissa Mayer, Google; Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures; Shannon O'Leary; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly's Radar; Anne Ornish; Dean Ornish, Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Pierre Omidyar, Omidyar network; Pam Omidyar, Omidyar Network; Larry Page, Google; Lori Park, Google; Nick Pritzker; Lisa Randall, Harvard; Jacqui Safra; Linda Stone; Yossi Vardi; Evan Williams, Twitter; Nathan Wolfe, Stanford; Richard Saul Wurman, Founder, TED

[Continue to Edge Dinner 2009]

[ED. NOTE: Edge contributors will be pleased to read about Sara Lippincott in John McPhee's article in the February 9th edition of The New Yorker (see abstract below, from the magazine's Web site). Sara has has served as the line editor of all the Edge Annual Question books, turning our lightly edited Web texts into publishable and well-received books. —JB]

THE NEW YORKER
February 9, 2009

CHECKPOINTS
Where accuracy meets flair. (Registration required.)
by John McPhee

Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker's fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer's called "The Curve of Binding Energy" received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, "Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick." The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler's story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara's telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn't know about it. Sara finally located a site manager who confirmed that the balloon had landed on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. The fix was made and the piece ran. Sometimes a mistake is introduced during the checking process. This has happened to the writer only once—and nearly thirty years ago. The piece, called "Basin and Range," was the first in a series of long pieces on geology. Mentions current fact-checker Joshua Hersh. Sara, who checked the "Basin" piece, told the writer that he was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest. Eldridge Moores had apparently confirmed it. After the piece was published, the writer called Moores, who said that it was in fact the Aegean Plate, not the Adriatic, that was moving southwest. Any error is everlasting. Mentions Time and Atlantic. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, and the editor. In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to sweep up behind him, the writer likes to guess at certain names and numbers early on. Mentions Willy Bemis and the Illinois River. Describes the process of fact-checking a piece the writer wrote in 2003 about tracing John and Henry Thoreau's upstream journey. Mentions Henry Moore's "Oval with Points." The writer describes checking parts of a book he was writing in 2002. The task took him three months. Mentions William Penn, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Seccombe. ...

...

 WAITING FOR "THE FINAL PLAGUE" [1.30.09]
A Talk with Nathan Wolfe

We should be and we can be doing a much better job to predict and prevent pandemics. But the really bold idea is that we could reach a point—and this is a distant point in the future—where we become so good at this that we really reach a point where we have the "final plague," and where we are really capable of catching so many of these things that new pandemics become an oddity. I think that is something that we should certainly have as an ideal.

INTRODUCTION

Nathan Wolfe trained at Harvard under Marc Hauser (where he was Hauser's first doctoral student) and Richard Wrangham. "I started working with Richard and thinking about self-medicating behavior of chimpanzees," he says. "Richard encouraged me to understand what the chimps may be treating, and so I starting thinking about what are the viruses, what are the microorganisms of chimps that they may be consuming plants in order to treat. Then I never really came back from that."

Subsequently he lived in Malaysia for three years and then in Africa for close to seven years. He describes himself as "a nice Jewish boy from suburban Detroit", which opens up an interesting line of research for Edge scientists, given that our other pandemics expert, Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org. and the man credited with eliminating smallpox, is also "a nice Jewish boy from suburban Detroit"."I'm sure it was some kind of rebellion," Wolfe said, "but I'm not sure what it was. My grandmother, for years, even when I became an assistant professor at Hopkins, said, "Will this let you go back and get an MD now, Nathan?" Something like that. I do come from that sort of family background, but they just figure it is working out okay. They certainly wish I would make a lot more money. But I told them you were going to help me with that. "

—John Brockman

NATHAN WOLFE is the Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (www.gvfi.org). His research combines methods from molecular virology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to study the biology of viral emergence.

Nathan Wolfe's Edge Bio Page

...

REFLECTIONS ON A CRISIS [1.30.09]
Daniel Kahneman & Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Conversation in Munich
(Moderator: John Brockman)

View the complete 1-hour HD streaming video of the Edge event that took place at Hubert Burda Media's Digital Life Design Conference (DLD) in Munich on January 27th as the greatest living psychologist and the foremost scholar of extreme events discuss hindsight biases, the illusion of patterns, perception of risk, and denial.

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of Fooled by Randomness and the international bestseller The Black Swan.

Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize Lecture
Nassim Taleb's Edge Bio Page

An EDGE @ DLD Event

HOW WORDS COULD END A WAR [1.27.09]
By Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges

... Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.

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. JEREMY GINGES is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page
Jeremy Ginges's Edge Bio Page

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OAF OF OFFICE [1.22.09]
By Steven Pinker

...On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” When Mr. Obama paused after “execute,” the chief justice prompted him to continue with “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling. ...

STEVEN PINKER is Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought; chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

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We will restore science to its rightful place... We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. —Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works. —Jerry Coyne

DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH? [1.21.2009]

By Jerry Coyne

An Edge Special Event

JERRY A. COYNE is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. His new book is Why Evolution Is True.

Jerry Coyne's Edge Bio page

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TULIPS
A new exhibition by Katinka Matson
(Click here)

THE NOBEL PRIZE AND AFTER [1.15.09]
A Talk with Frank Wilczek

The most exciting thing that can happen is when theoretical dreams that started as fantasies, as desires, become projects that people work hard to build. There is nothing like it; it is the ultimate tribute. At one moment you have just a glimmer of a thought and at another moment squiggles on paper. Then one day you walk into a laboratory and there are all these pipes, and liquid helium is flowing, and currents are coming in and out with complicated wiring, and somehow all this activity is supposedly corresponds to those little thoughts that you had. When this happens, it's magic.

FRANK WILCZEK, a theoretical physicist at MIT and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2004), is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). He is the author of Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
January 11, 2009

click to enlarge

A RENOWNED SCIENTIST OF THE MIND PONDERS THE IDENTITY BURIED IN HIS OWN DNA

MY GENOME, MY SELF
By Steven Pinker

In the coming era of consumer genetics, your DNA will have much to tell you about the biological bases of your health, your physique and even your personality. But will this knowledge really amount to self-knowledge?

... Looking to the genome for the nature of the person is far from innocuous. In the 20th century, many intellectuals embraced the idea that babies are blank slates that are inscribed by parents and society. It allowed them to distance themselves from toxic doctrines like that of a superior race, the eugenic breeding of a better species or a genetic version of the Twinkie Defense in which individuals or society could evade responsibility by saying that it's all in the genes. When it came to human behavior, the attitude toward genetics was "Don't go there." Those who did go there found themselves picketed, tarred as Nazis and genetic determinists or, in the case of the biologist E. O. Wilson, doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific conference.

Today, as the lessons of history have become clearer, the taboo is fading. Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture. Today it is the humane democracies of Scandinavia that are hotbeds of research in behavioral genetics, and two of the groups who were historically most victimized by racial pseudoscience — Jews and African-Americans — are among the most avid consumers of information about their genes. ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 11, 2009

SLIPSTREAM
IN VENTING, A COMPUTER VISIONARY EDUCATES

By John Markoff

BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers would transform the printed page.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term "hypertext," which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, "Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way" (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward. ...

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SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER [1.1.09]
By V.S. Ramachandran

One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. "Who am I" is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.

It really breaks down into two problems—the problem of qualia and the problem of the self. My colleagues, the late Francis Crick and Christof Koch have done a valuable service in pointing out that consciousness might be an empirical rather than philosophical problem, and have offered some ingenious suggestions. But I would disagree with their position that the qualia problem is simpler and should be addressed first before we tackle the "Self." I think the very opposite is true. I have every confidence that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most people reading this column. But not qualia.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is a Neuroscientist, Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego; Author, Phantoms in the Brain.

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Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified,
since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial.

WORLD QUESTION CENTER
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

151 Contributors: Alan Alda, Chris Anderson, Alun Anderson, Stephon H. Alexander, Mahzarin R. Banaji, John D. Barrow, Patrick Bateson, Gregory Benford, Yochai Benkler, Jesse Bering, David Berreby, Jamshed Bharucha, Susan Blackmore, David Bodanis, Stefano Boeri, Lera Boroditsky, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, David Buss, William Calvin, Leo Chalupa, Nicholas A. Christakis, Andy Clark, Gregory Cochran, M. Csikszentmihalyi, Austin Dacey, David Dalrymple, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Emanuel Derman, Daniel C. Dennett, Keith Devlin, Betsy Devine, Eric Drexler, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, David Eagleman, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Daniel Everett, Paul Ewald, Christine Finn, Eric Fischl, Helen Fisher, Kenneth W. Ford, Richard Foreman, Howard Gardner, Joel Garreau, James Geary, David Gelernter, Neil Gershenfeld, Marcelo Gleiser, Daniel Goleman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Brian Goodwin, Alison Gopnik, April Gornik, John Gottman, Jonathan Haidt, Haim Harari, Henry Harpending, Sam Harris, Marc D. Hauser, Marti Hearst, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Gerald Holton, Donald D. Hoffman, Verena Huber-Dyson, Nicholas Humphrey, Marco Iacoboni, Eric Kandel, Stuart Kauffman, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, MD, Brian Knutson, Terence Koh, Bart Kosko, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Kai Krause, Laurence Krauss, Andrian Kreye, A. Garrett Lisi, Seth Lloyd, Gary Marcus, Ian McEwan, Thomas Metzinger, Oliver Morton, David G. Myers, P.Z. Myers, Steve Nadis, Monica Narula, Randolph Nesse, Tor Nørretranders, Hans Ulrich Obrist, James J. O'Donnell, Gloria Origgi, Dean Ornish, M.D., Mark Pagel, Bruce Parker, Philippe Parreno, Gregory Paul, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford A. Pickover, Steven Pinker, Ernst Pöppel, Corey S. Powell, Robert R. Provine, Lisa Randall, Ed Regis, Howard Rheingold, Carlo Rovelli, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Paul Saffo, Scott Sampson, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar Sasselov, Roger Schank, Stephen H. Schneider, Peter Schwartz, Charles Seife, Gino Segrè, Tino Sehgal, Terrence Sejnowski, Martin Seligman, Robert Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Shermer, Kevin Slavin, Barry Smith, Laurence C. Smith, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Paul J. Steinhardt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Frank J. Tipler, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Joseph F. Traub, Sherry Turkle, Alexander Vilenkin, J. Craig Venter, Frank Wilczek, Ian Wilmut, Anton Zeilinger