SCIENCE AT THE EDGE

Edited, with an Introduction by
John Brockman

UK: Weidenfeld & Nicholson
US: Barnes & Noble
August, 2004

Jared Diamond • Steven Pinker • Helena Cronin • Andy Clark • Marc D. Hauser • Richard Wrangham • Daniel C. Dennett • Stephen M. Kosslyn • Jordan B. Pollack • David Gelernter • Rodney Brooks • Hans Moravec • David Deutsch • Marvin Minsky • Ray Kurzweil • Jaron Lanier • Seth Lloyd • Alan Guth • Paul Steinhardt • Lisa Randall • Lee Smolin • Martin Rees • edited • with an introduction by John Brockman

Table of Contents & Contributors

Introduction: The New Humanists
By John Brockman, editor
Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in physics, electricity, genetics, neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry of materials—all are challenging basic assumptions of who and what we are, of what it means to be human. The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort—scientists, science-based humanities scholars, writers—are at the center of today's intellectual action.

They are the new humanists.
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JOHN BROCKMAN is a cultural impresario whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. In the 1960s he coined the word "intermedia" and pioneered "intermedia kinetic environments" in art, theatre, and commerce, while also consulting for clients such as General Electric, Columbia Pictures, Scott Paper, The Pentagon, and the White House.

In 1973, he formed Brockman, Inc., the international literary and software agency specializing in serious nonfiction. He is the founder of the nonprofit Edge Foundation, Inc. and editor of Edge (www.edge.org), the highly acclaimed website devoted to discussions of cutting edge science by many of the world's brilliant thinkers, the leaders of what he has termed "the third culture".

Included in his works as author and/or editor are By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture, Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite;editor of The Greatest Inventions in the Past Two Thousand Years, and The Next Fifty Years : Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century; Science at the Edge.

Brockman has the distinction of being the only person to have been profiled on Page One of both The New York Sunday Times "Arts & Leisure" (1966), and The New York Times "Science Times" (1997).

Part I: Homo sapiens

"A New Scientific Synthesis of Human History "
Jared Diamond
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? Historians tend to avoid this subject like the plague, because of its apparently racist overtones. Many people, or even most people, assume that the answer involves biological differences in average IQ among the world's populations, despite the fact that there is no evidence for the existence of such IQ differences.?In case the stink of racism still makes you feel uncomfortable about exploring this subject, just reflect on the underlying reason that so many people accept racist explanations of history's broad pattern: We don't have a convincing alternative explanation. Until we do, people will continue to gravitate by default to racist theories. That leaves us with a huge moral gap, which constitutes the strongest reason for tackling this uncomfortable subject.
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JARED DIAMOND is a professor of geography at UCLA, a MacArthur Fellow, winner of the National Medal of Science, and author of The Third Chimpanzee (awarded the British Science Book Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.

"A Biological Understanding of Human Nature"
Steven Pinker
I believe that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature prevalent among pundits and intellectuals which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. The theory has three parts: [T]he Blank Slate—that we have no inherent talents or temperaments because the mind is shaped completely by the environment (parenting, culture, and society). The second is the myth of the Noble Savage—that evil motives are not inherent in people but spring from corrupting social institutions. The third is the Ghost in the Machine—that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.
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STEVEN PINKER, an experimental psychologist, is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author of, among other books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and most recently The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

"Getting Human Nature Right"
Helena Cronin
Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging, common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species. But human behavior, which is generated by that nature, is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules—the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So, the answer to genetic determinism is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment. And to know which changes would be appropriate and effective, you have to know those Darwinian rules. You need only to understand human nature, not to change it.
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HELENA CRONIN is a codirector of the London School of Economic's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, where she runs the wide-ranging and successful program called Darwin@LSE, which fosters research at the forefront of evolutionary theory. She is the author of The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today.

"Natural-Born Cyborgs? "
Andy Clark
Our brains are (by nature) unusually plastic; their biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of nonbiological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory-tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures—ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.
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ANDY CLARK is professor of philosophy and director of the cognitive science program at Indiana University. He was previously professor of philosophy at Sussex University, UK, and director of the Philosophy/ Neuroscience/ Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing; Associative Engines; Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again; Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science; and Natural-Born Cyborgs.

"Animal Minds"
Marc D. Hauser
In my own work, we've begun looking at the kinds of computations that animals and human infants are capable of when they interact with the physical and social world. We want to understand how such capacities evolved and how they constrain thought.
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MARC D. HAUSER is a Harvard College Professor, professor of psychology at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, and codirector of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award, and for several years, has been voted by Harvard students as one of the most popular professors on campus. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, The Design of Animal Communication, and Wild Minds.

"The Evolution of Cooking"
Richard Wrangham
A lot of people find it hard to live with the idea that we've had a natural history of violence. But if we look at ourselves an animal, it's clear that natural selection has favored emotions in men that predispose them to enjoy competition, to enjoy subordinating other men, to enjoy even killing other men. These are difficult ideas to accept, and there are people who argue that it's inappropriate to write about such ideas, and they look for ways to undermine the evidence. What they seem to fear is that once a biological component in our violent behavior is recognized, then violence may be seen as inevitable.
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RICHARD WRANGHAM is a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University who studies chimpanzees in Uganda with an eye to illuminating human evolution and behavior. One of Wrangham's central ideas is that we should cherish the parallels between humans and other great apes, because they help us to understand our own behavior. "For all our self-consciousness, we humans continue to follow biological rules," he notes. "Life is easier if we understand those rules. Recognition of the deep contradictions in humanity binds us to our past and also lights our future." Wrangham is the author, with Dale Peterson, of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

"The Computational Perspective"
Daniel C. Dennett
When I go to a workshop or conference and give a talk, I'm actually doing research, because the howls and screeches and frowns that I get from people, the way in which they react to what I suggest, is often diagnostic of how they are picturing the problems in their own minds. And in fact people have very different covert images about what the mind is and how the mind works. The trick is to expose these images, to bring them up into public view and then correct them. That's what I specialize in.
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DANIEL C. DENNETT is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of, among other books, Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Kinds of Minds, and, most recently, Freedom Evolves.

"What Shape Are a German Shepherd's Ears?"
Stephen M. Kosslyn
There is a gigantic project, yet to be done, that will root psychology in the rest of natural science. Once this is accomplished, you'll be able to go from phenomenology (things like mental imagery) to information processing?to the brain?down through the workings of the neurons, including the biochemistry, all the way to the biophysics and the way that genes are up-regulated and down-regulated. This is going to happen; I have no doubt at all. When it does, we're going to have a vastly better understanding of human nature than at any other time in human history.
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STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN, the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has published over 250 papers on the nature of visual mental imagery and related topics. He is a cofounder and senior editor of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and has served on several National Research Council committees advising the government on new technologies. His books include Image and Mind; Ghosts in the Mind's Machine; Elements of Graph Design; Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience (with Olivier Koenig); Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate; and Psychology: The Brain, the Person, the World (with Robin Rosenberg).

Part II: Machina sapiens

"Software Is a Cultural Solvent"
Jordan B. Pollack
I work on developing an understanding of biological complexity and how we can create it, because the limits of software engineering have been clear now for two decades. The biggest programs anyone can build are about 10 million lines of code. A real biological object—a creature, an ecosystem, a brain—is something with the same complexity as 10 billion lines of code. And how do we get there?
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JORDAN B. POLLACK is a professor of computer science and complex systems at Brandeis University. His laboratory's work on AI, artificial life, neural networks, evolution, dynamical systems, games, robotics, machine learning, and educational technology has been reported on by the New York Times, Time, Science, NPR, and other media sources worldwide. Pollack is a prolific inventor, advises several start up companies, and in his spare time runs Thinmail, which makes software to enhance e-mail and wireless telephone communications.

"The Second Coming: a Manifesto"
David Gelernter
The theme of the Second Age, now approaching, is that computing transcends computers. Information will travel through a sea of anonymous, interchangeable computers like a breeze through tall grass. A desktop computer will be a scooped-out hole in the beach, where information from the cybersphere wells up like seawater.
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DAVID GELERNTER, a professor of computer science at Yale University and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, is a leading figure in the third generation of artificial intelligence researchers and the inventor of a programming language called Linda, which made it possible to link computers to work on a single problem. He has since emerged as one of the seminal thinkers in the field known as parallel, or distributed, computing. His books include Mirror Worlds; The Muse in the Machine; 1939: The Lost World of the Fair; and Judaism Beyond Words.

"Making Living Systems"
Rodney Brooks
My midlife research crisis has been to move away from looking at humanoid robots and toward looking at the very simple question of what makes something alive—what the organizing principles are that go on inside living systems. In my lab at MIT, we're trying to build robots that have properties of living systems that robots haven't had before.
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RODNEY BROOKS is the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT. He is also the chairman and chief technical officer of iRobot, a robotics company. He is the author of Flesh and Machines and Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New A.I.

"Making Minds"
Hans Moravec
Perhaps programs that implement humanlike intelligence in a highly abstract way are possible on existing computers, as AI traditionalists imagine. Perhaps, as they also imagine, devising such programs requires lifetimes of work by world-class geniuses. But it may not be so easy.
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HANS MORAVEC is a principal research scientist in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

"Quantum Computation"
David Deutsch
For me, the main application of the theory [of quantum computation] is to change our sense of the nature of reality. Regardless of its practical applications in the distant future, the really important thing is the philosophical implications—epistemological and metaphysical—and the implications for theoretical physics itself. One of the most important implications is one that we get before we even build the first qubit [quantum bit]. The very structure of the theory forces upon us a view of physical reality as a multiverse.
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DAVID DEUTSCH's papers on quantum computation laid the foundations for that field, breaking new ground both in physics and the theory of computation and triggering an explosion of research efforts worldwide. His work revealed the importance of quantum effects in the physics of time travel, and he is the most prominent contemporary researcher in the quantum theory of parallel universes. In 1998, he was awarded the Paul Dirac Prize by Britain's Institute of Physics "for pioneering work in quantum computation leading to the concept of a quantum computer and for contributing to the understanding of how such devices might be constructed from quantum logic gates in quantum networks." He is a founding member of the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, and the author of The Fabric of Reality.

"What Comes After Minds"
Marvin Minsky
Tens of thousands of researchers today, in the field called artificial intelligence, are striving to endow machines with?humanlike abilities. They've developed programs that outperform people in many specialized domains. Some solve hard mathematical problems or skillfully pilot ships and planes. Others can recognize voices and faces or objects on assembly lines. But none of them yet can dress themselves, or understand the sorts of things that young children can. Why don't any computers yet have what we call everyday, commonsense knowledge or do the sorts of reasoning that we regard as obvious?
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MARVIN MINSKY is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has led to both theoretical and practical advances in mathematics, computer science, physics, psychology, and artificial intelligence, with notable contributions in the domains of computational semantics and knowledge representation, machine perception and learning, and theories of human problem solving. Minsky is also the inventor of the popular Confocal Scanning Microscope, which revolutionized our ability to see dense microscopic structures. He is the author of The Society of Mind and the forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine.

"The Singularity "
Ray Kurzweil
We are entering a new era. I call it the Singularity. It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence which is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it has occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny, and part of the destiny of evolution, to continue to progress ever faster and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially.
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RAY KURZWEIL is an inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He was the principal developer of (among a host of other inventions) the first omni-font optical character recognition software, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of re-creating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition system. He received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and the national best-seller The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.

"One Half of a Manifesto"
Jaron Lanier
We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.
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JARON LANIER is a computer scientist, composer, and visual artist, probably best known for his work in Virtual Reality, a term he coined. Until recently, he was the lead scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2. His current research interests include real-time remote terascale processing, autostereo methods, and haptics.

Part III: And Beyond...

"How Fast, How Small, How Powerful? Moore's Law and the Ultimate Laptop "
Seth Lloyd
Now we have created devices called computers, which can register and process huge amounts of information—a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed in that way?I see our species at a very interesting point in its history, which is the point at which our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process.
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SETH LLOYD is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. He works on problems having to do with information and complex systems, from the very small (How do atoms process information? How can you make them compute?) to the very large (How does society process information? And how can we understand society in terms of its ability to process information?).

"A Golden Age of Cosmology"
Alan Guth
The classical theory was never really a theory of a bang; it was a theory about the aftermath of a bang. It started with all of the matter in the universe already in place, already undergoing rapid expansion, already incredibly hot. There was no explanation of how the universe got that way. Inflation is an attempt to answer the question of what made the universe bang, and now it looks as though it's almost certainly the right answer.
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ALAN GUTH, the father of the inflationary theory of the universe, is the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at MIT. His research interests are in the area of elementary particle theory and the application of particle theory to the early universe. In 2002 he was awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, along with Paul Steinhardt and Andrei Linde, for the development of the concept of inflation in cosmology. He is the author of The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins.

"The Cyclic Universe"
Paul Steinhardt
[F]or the past year I've been involved in the development of an alternative theory that turns cosmic history topsy-turvy. In it, all the events that created the important features of our universe occur in a different order, by different physics, at different times, over different time scales—and yet this model seems capable of reproducing all of the successful predictions of the consensus picture with the same exquisite detail.
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PAUL STEINHARDT is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and a professor in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He is one of the leading theorists responsible for inflationary theory, having been involved in constructing the first workable model of inflation and the theory of how inflation could produce seeds for galaxy formation. He was also among the first to show evidence for dark energy and cosmic acceleration, introducing the term "quintessence" to refer to dynamical forms of dark energy. In 2002 he was awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, along with Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, for the development of the concept of inflation in cosmology.

"Theories of the Brane"
Lisa Randall
Additional spatial dimensions may seem like a wild and crazy idea at first, but there are powerful reasons to believe that there really are extra dimensions of space. One reason resides in string theory, in which it is postulated that the particles are not themselves fundamental but are oscillation modes of a fundamental string.
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LISA RANDALL is a professor of physics at Harvard University, where she also earned her PhD (1987). She was a President's Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and a junior fellow at Harvard before joining the MIT faculty in 1991. Between 1998 and 2000, she had a joint appointment at Princeton and MIT as a full professor, and she moved to Harvard as a full professor in 2001. Her research in theoretical high energy physics is primarily related to exploring the physics underlying the standard model of particle physics. This has involved studies of supersymmetry and, most recently, extra dimensions of space.

"Loop Quantum Gravity"
Lee Smolin
It's only since the middle 1980s that real progress began to be made on unifying relativity and quantum theory. The turning point was the invention of not one but two approaches: loop quantum gravity and string theory. Since then, we have been making steady progress on both of these approaches. In each case, we are able to do calculations that predict surprising new phenomena. Still, we are not done. Neither is yet in final form; there are still things to understand. But the really important news is that there is now a real chance of doing experiments that will test the new predictions of these theories. This is important, because we're in the uncomfortable situation of having two well- developed candidates for the quantum theory of gravity. We need to reduce these to one theory. We can do this either by finding that one is wrong and the other right, or by finding that the two theories can themselves be unified.
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LEE SMOLIN is a founding member and research physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario. A prominent contributor to the subject of quantum gravity, he is also the author of The Life of the Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

"A Look Ahead"
Martin Rees
The challenge is to understand how complexity emerges. This is just as fundamental as the challenge to come up with the so-called theory of everything—and it is independent of it. The theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg says that if you go on asking "Why?why?why?" you get back to a question in particle physics or cosmology. That's true to a degree, but only in a limited sense.
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SIR MARTIN REES is Royal Society Professor at Cambridge University, a fellow of Kings College, and the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal. He was previously Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, having been elected to this chair at the age of thirty, succeeding Fred Hoyle. He is the author of several books, including Gravity's Fatal Attraction (with Mitchell Begelman); Before the Beginning; Just Six Numbers; Our Cosmic Habitat; and Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century—On Earth and Beyond.

Epilog
Responses to "The New Humanists"
Nicholas Humphrey, Jaron Lanier, Joseph LeDoux, John Horgan, Timothy Taylor, Carlo Rovelli, Steven Johnson, Lee Smolin, Douglas Rushkoff, Piet Hut, Marc D. Hauser, Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, Denis Dutton, Daniel C. Dennett, Howard Rheingold, Chris Anderson

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