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Edge
199 — December 28, 2006 |
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10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION |
EDITOR'S NOTE: I am pleased to announce that the 10th Anniversary Edition, featuring the 2007 Edge Annual Question, will be published midnight, New Year's Eve. This particular Edge edition, and this Question (which is under wraps until publication) will be a great way to start the New Year. This week also marks the 10th anniversary of Edge, which began the last week in December, 1996 as an email to about fifty people. In 2006, EDGE, which celebrates "the third culture", has had more than five million user sessions (up from two million in 2005). Thanks to all of you in the extended Edge community for your continued interest and support. Happy New Year! John
Brockman |
PUBLICATION: |
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Noam Chomsky on "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival" |
Noam
Chomsky These
are nothing more than a few thoughts on some issues that have been
raised. Like everyone participating I'm what's called here a "secular atheist," except that I can't even call myself an "atheist" because it is not at all clear what I'm being asked to deny. However, it should be obvious to everyone that by and large science reaches deep explanatory theories to the extent that it narrows its gaze. If a problem is too hard for physicists, they hand it over to chemists, and so on down the line until it ends with people who try to deal somehow with human affairs, where scientific understanding is very thin, and is likely to remain so, except in a few areas that can be abstracted for special studies. On the ordinary problems of human life, science tells us very little, and scientists as people are surely no guide. In fact they are often the worst guide, because they often tend to focus, laser-like, on their professional interests and know very little about the world. As for the various religions, there's no doubt that they are very meaningful to adherents, and allow them to delude themselves into thinking there is some meaning to their lives beyond what we agree is the case. I'd never try to talk them out of the delusions, which are necessary for them to live a life that makes some sense to them. These beliefs can provide a framework for deeds that are noble or savage, and anywhere in between, and there's every reason to focus attention on the deeds and the background for them, to the extent that we can grasp it. Doubtless more understanding can be gained, and is being gained (by Atran’s work, for example). That's all to the good for trying to comprehend the strange animals we are — but I don't see any signs that such comprehension is likely to be very deep. An Edge Discussion
on Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival |
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BEWARE
THE ONLINE COLLECTIVE
What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis. |
10
MYTHS — AND 10 TRUTHS — ABOUT ATHEISM
When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty. |
LISA RANDALL / EDWARD O. WILSON
Segment
1: A discussion about theoretical physics with Harvard professor Lisa
Randall. Her
book is called Warped Passages: Unraveling
the Mysteries of The Universe's Hidden Dimensions. |
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"A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling."
JOHN Brockman is a kind of entrepreneur of ideas. He runs edge.org, a website for boffins, and writes and edits clever books on subjects such as the future and God. Here, he has had what might be his whizziest idea yet. He simply asked the cleverest scientists in the world to tell him one thing: what is the most dangerous idea they can think of? And they did. And it's really good. When you ask clever people about dangerous ideas, it turns out, they normally say one of two things. Some say that we, as a species, are becoming too clever for our own good - that our ideas are excellent, and that, pretty soon, life will get much worse as a result. Others say quite the opposite - that the human race has no idea about anything, and that, pretty soon, we'll realise this fact, and that, as a result, life will be much worse. Of course I'm simplifying. But not much. Let's start with John Horgan, of the Stevens Institute of Technology. What, he asks quite reasonably, would happen if we managed to get to the bottom of the "neural code", and understood exactly how the brain works? "Will we be liberated or enslaved by this knowledge?" he asks. Quite possibly enslaved, because nobody would be able to believe in the soul any more. And David Buss, the Darwinian psychologist famous for his research into human mating behaviour, wonders what might happen if we understood ourselves so well that we could grasp the concept "that evil has evolved". That, in other words, lots of us are descended from tyrants such as Attila the Hun. And that, therefore, he has passed on some of his evil genes to us. In the end, says Buss, we need to face up to this. "The danger," he says, "comes from people who refuse to recognise that there are dark sides to human nature." The geneticist
Craig Venter has similar worries - understanding the fact that we
are all different, genetically speaking, challenges the cosy, politically-correct
word we have got used to. On the other hand, what if we don't know anything? The Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind wonders about the effect of the " landscape" idea on the future of physics. What if the universe is so big that, "rather than being a homogeneous, mono-colored blanket, it is a crazy-quilt patchwork of different environments"? In this case, we might realise that we only have knowledge of an infinitely small part of it. And then, dispirited, we might give up the ghost. Maths in the digital age, writes the Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz, has entered a troublesome new world. These days, we are able prove theorems by crunching numbers in unearthly quantities. But we have no insight - we may know that something is true, but not why. Scary, no? And psychologist Geoffrey Miller gives us a good reason why we haven't had signals from other life-forms - because, if they ever did exist, they got so good at sating themselves with junk food and video games that they died out. A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling. But is anything else out there? Quite possibly. As the physicist W Daniel Hillis says: "I don't share my most dangerous ideas." |
"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle — a book ro be dog-eared and debated." WHAT
WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE
|
"Intelligent Thought, edited by John Brockman, is a collection of essays from the likes of Jerry Coyne and Tim White who provide elegantly expressed scientific arguments to counter the claims of intelligent design." Books
and Arts 2006
wrapped up It has been a strange year for science books. Some authors have presented new ideas about science — there has been a tussle over string theory, for example, and in Moral Minds Marc Hauser has suggested that morality is as innate as language (see Nature 443, 909–910; 2006).But perhaps the dominant theme running through many of the popular science books published this year has been, surprisingly, religion. The continuing debate about the teaching of creationism in schools has no doubt fuelled this preoccupation. Many scientists, particularly those in the United States, have been moved to take a stand against proponents of creationism and intelligent design. Intelligent Thought, edited by John Brockman, is a collection of essays from the likes of Jerry Coyne and Tim White who provide elegantly expressed scientific arguments to counter the claims of intelligent design. This book should appeal to "those who already see evolutionary biology as a science", according to John Tyler Bonner (see Nature 442, 355–356; 2006). Michael Shermer's Why Darwin Matters is perhaps more accessible for the public, but neither book is likely to sway creationists from their belief. Many of the scientists who made it to the top of the bestseller lists focused specifically on religion. Daniel Dennett's book Breaking the Spell provides essentially a natural history of religion but skirts around the cultural reasons why religion has developed and become such a dominant force in politics today, in the view of reviewer Michael Ruse (see Nature 439, 535; 2006).
Dawkins' domination of the genre of popular science books was celebrated earlier in the year with the publication by Oxford University Press of a thirtieth-anniversary edition of his book The Selfish Gene, and Richard Dawkins: How A Scientist Changed the Way We Think, a collection of comments and testimonials edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (see Nature 441, 151–152; 2006). Physicists have also been questioning our place in the Universe. Cosmologist Alex Vilenkin's Many Worlds in One takes a look at the multiverse theory — the idea that many different universes exist and explanations for how we came to be in this one (see Nature 443, 145–146; 2006). Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma gives the topic a more popular treatment (see Nature 444, 423–424; 2006). ... After a spate of books on string theory in 2005, the hottest hope for a 'theory of everything' came in for criticism this year, with the appearance of Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics ... (see Nature 443, 482, 491 ... 2006). |
DIGITAL
MAOISM But all the hype over the powers of the so-called hive mind was bound to provoke a reaction, and in May of this year, it arrived in the form of a thoughtful — though controversial — essay by the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. “What we are witnessing today,” Lanier wrote on Edge.org, “is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments and major universities have all gotten the bug.” Lanier dubbed this newthink “digital Maoism.” Against this collectivist mythos, Lanier tried to carve out a crucial space for the insight and creativity of the individual mind. Unlike most counterrevolutionary manifestoes, however, Lanier’s essay aimed not so much to topple the dominant regime as to limit its application. “There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual,” he wrote. “When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective. . . . But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.” In the essay, Lanier grouped everything from his personal Wikipedia entry to “American Idol” under the umbrella of digital Maoism, and many of the responses to the article by assorted Internet luminaries observed that Lanier had elided important differences between these systems to make his point. The entirety of Wikipedia, for instance, is most certainly a collective undertaking, but many articles are written and edited by small numbers of individuals. Wikipedia may be not too far from the historical reality of Maoism itself: a system propagandized with the language of collectivism that was, in practice, actually run by a small power elite. In any case, culture and technology are increasingly reliant on the hive mind — and whatever its faults, Lanier’s broadside helps us consider the consequences of this momentous development. A swarm of connected human minds is a fantastic resource for tracking down software bugs or discovering obscure gems on the Web. But if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you’re still better off going solo. ... |
Multiverse enthusiasts have in turn accused the unification theorists of promissory triumphalism because nobody has yet demonstrated a credible unique theory, let alone predicted the values of any Goldilocks parameters. This acrimonious wrangling reveals deep divisions concerning the ultimate goal of science, the nature of physical reality and the place of conscious observers in the grand scheme of things. It raises far-reaching and unresolved problems, such as what is life and what is the universe? Over the past couple of decades, physicists, cosmologists, biologists and other scientists have discussed these foundational questions of science at a growing number of conferences and workshops, or expressed their opinions informally through websites such as www.edge.org or the Los Alamos electronic archive. |
|
Will
Wright's Dangerous Idea A Global Who's Who Five hundred entrepreneurs, thinkers, designers, educators, and inventors attended this year's conference, which closed Saturday, and which focused on the theme of Dangerous Ideas. ... While a glance at the Pop!Tech program suggests an eclectic, almost random assortment of interesting people—co-founder of the Global Business Network Stewart Brand and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman...the conference held together surprisingly well, in part because one particular "dangerous idea" kept coming up again and again. ... In the kick-off session, Brian Eno, the British experimental-music pioneer and theorist, presented an idea which shocked society when it was first introduced and which, although now widely accepted, continues to reverberate through culture and business: the theory of evolution. ... Pop!Tech isn't the only one to emphasize community and the power of the network, but it walks the walk more than some. Its focus is less on high-power networking—there's no equivalent of the exclusive "Billionaire's Dinner" that publisher John Brockman hosts for TED muckety-mucks every year—and more on the network. ... |
Opinion ...More recently I found "Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement," fascinating brief essays by leading evolutionists and edited by John Brockman. ... Each side of the evolution versus intelligent design debate has tended to draw me similarly, yet there is a winner. I am persuaded that the evolutionists have far the better case. In an essay titled "Unintelligent Design," Scott Atran, in the last volume noted above, points out that "no scientific theory can ever be proved true, but states that "scientific theories are validated when their surprising predictions are confirmed ..." ... (Grael Gannon, of Bismarck, is a teacher at Shiloh Christian School.) |
Einstein
and me |
BEWARE THE ONLINE COLLECTIVE (JARON LANIER:) It's funny being an "old timer" in the world of the Internet. About six years ago, when I was 40 years old, a Stanford freshman said to me, "Wow Jaron Lanier—you're still alive?" If there's any use to sticking around for the long haul — as computers get so much more powerful that every couple of years our assumptions about what they can do have to be replaced — it might be in noticing patterns or principles that may not be so apparent to the latest hundred million kids who have just arrived online. There's one observation of mine, about a potential danger, that has caused quite a ruckus in the last half-year. I wrote about it initially in an essay called "Digital Maoism." Here's the idea in a nutshell: Let's start with an observation about the whole of human history, predating computers. People have often been willing to give up personal identity and join into a collective. Historically, that propensity has usually been very bad news. Collectives tend to be mean, to designate official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous thought. Fascists, communists, religious cults, criminal "families" — there has been no end to the varieties of human collectives, but it seems to me that these examples have quite a lot in common. I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob. One of the most wonderful things about the rise of the Web and other Internet-based communication schemes is how anti-mob they have been. I was in heaven 10 years ago watching millions of people build web sites for the first time as a form of expression. I'm just as excited today when I run across a creative web page, Myspace site, YouTube video or whatever. There are zillions of people out there who are developing themselves, reaching out to others, becoming more creative, better educated, and richer than they otherwise would have been. My personal favorite of the current batch of fast growing sites might be Second Life, where people create avatars of themselves to share in a virtual world. Bravo! In the last few years, though, a new twist has appeared. Along with all the sites that encourage individual expression, we are seeing a flood of schemes that celebrate collective action by huge numbers of bland, anonymous people. A lot of folks love this stuff. My worry is that we're playing with fire. There are a lot of recent examples of collectivity online. There's the Wikipedia, which has absorbed a lot of the energy that used to go into individual, expressive websites, into one bland, master description of reality. Another example is the automatic mass-content collecting schemes like DIGG. Yet another, which deserves special attention, is the unfortunate design feature in most blog software that practically encourages spontaneous pseudonym creation. That has led to the global flood of anonymous mob-like commentary. I remember the first time I noticed myself becoming mean when I left an anonymous comment on a blog. What is it about that situation that seems to bring out the worst in people so often? It's a shame, because the benefits of blogs (such as that citizen journalists can pool resources to do research that otherwise might not get done) get cancelled out. Blogs often lead to such divisiveness that people end up caring more about clan membership than truth after a while. There's a pattern in recent online businesses that is sometimes called Web 2.0 that I think is distinct from the collectivity problem, but for some reason seems to be leading a lot of entrepreneurs into promoting collectives. The Web 2.0 notion is that an entrepreneur comes up with some scheme that attracts huge numbers of people to participate in an activity online — like the video sharing on YouTube, for instance. Then you can "monetize" at an astronomical level by offering a way to bring ads or online purchasing to people in your gigantic crowd of participants. What is amazing about this idea is that the people are the value — and they also pay for the value they provide instead of being paid for it. For instance, when you buy something that is advertized, part of the price goes to the ads — but in the new online world, you yourself were the bait for the ad you saw. The whole cycle is remarkably efficient and concentrates giant fortunes faster than any other business scheme in history. So what's wrong with this pretty picture? All too many entrepreneurs seem to think that if you reduce the human element, the scheme will become more efficient. Instead of asking people to create videos or avatars, which require creativity and commitment, just watch their clicks, have them take surveys, have them tweak collective works, add anonymous, unconsidered remarks, etc. This trend is lousy, in my opinion, because it encourages people to lose themsleves into groupthink. What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis. [First published by TIME Magazine, Dec. 25, 2006 issue] |
An Edge Original Essay |
Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold |
10 MYTHS — AND 10 TRUTHS — ABOUT ATHEISM (SAM HARRIS:) Several polls indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president. Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural. Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist." That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating. Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse. 1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless. On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless. 2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history. People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. 3) Atheism is dogmatic. Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." 4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance. No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself. The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species. 5) Atheism has no connection to science. Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is. 6) Atheists are arrogant. When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty. 7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience. There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences. There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate. 8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists. From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation. 9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society. Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth. In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it? 10) Atheism provides no basis for morality. If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness. We have
made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't
make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely.
Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every
civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination.
Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can
be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it
was handed down to us by the creator of the universe. [First published by the Los Angeles Times OpEd Page, Dec. 24, 2006] |
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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