EDGE 23

EDGE 23 — July 30, 1997

THE EDGE ARCHIVE

EDGE began operations in January of this year. Twenty-two editions of EDGE (more than two hundred thousand words) have been emailed to the third culture mail list. As a review and an update I attach a table of contents and a list of contributors. All the material is now archived and available on the EDGE Website.

Thanks to all of you for your interest and continuing support and participation. EDGE is interesting and fun because you are the content.

Stay tuned.

JB

p.s. The URL for the table of contents on the EDGE Website is: /edge index.html

(10,657 words)

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher | Kip Parent, Webmaster

THE EDGE ARCHIVE

EDGE 1
January 2, 1997

"SCIENCE, DELUSION AND THE APPETITE FOR WONDER"
A Talk by Richard Dawkins

/3rd_culture/dawkins/lecture_p1.html

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene (1976, 2d ed. 1989), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995), and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). Link: The Unofficial Dawkins Website — http://www.spacelab.net/~catalj/ .

THE REALITY CLUB

Responses to "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder": Murray Gell-Mann, Milford Wolpoff, Reuben Hersh, Karl Sabbagh, Duncan Steele, Stanislas Dehaene, Joseph Ledoux, Margie Profet, Jaron Lanier, Mike Godwin, Charles Simonyi, Paul Davies, Robert Shapiro, Carl Djerassi

EDGE 2
January 6, 1997

"THE COACH"
A Talk with John Doerr

/digerati/doerr/index.html

In less than five years today's "information highway" and Internet will appear just as primitive as those medieval roads. Today's congested 45 Mbps IP backbones must become autobahns, real superhighways. 14% of American homes are online, typically at 14.4 dialup. We should enter the next century with high band connects available to at least 10% of American homes.

JOHN DOERR is a venture capitalist and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who has sponsored a series of investments (Compaq, Cypress, Intuit, Macromedia, Lotus, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Symantec) that led to the creation of over 30,000 jobs. Doerr was the founding CEO of Silicon Compilers. He serves on the Board of Directors of Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Platinum, Shiva, Sun Microsystems, Academic Systems, The Lightspan Partnership, MNI Interactive, Amazon.com and Precept Software.

THE REALITY CLUB

Scott McNealy, John Dvorak, Ted Leonsis, And Richard Shaffer On "The Coach" (John Doerr)

"Implications of Natural Selection and the Laws of Physics:" Lee Smolin, Richard Dawkins, Nicholas Humphrey, Brian Goodwin, Jaron Lanier, George Johnson, Marcelo Gleiser; Response by Lee Smolin

EDGE 3
January 11, 1997

"ORGANS OF COMPUTATION"
A Talk with Steven Pinker

STEVEN PINKER is professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language Development, Learnability and Cognition, The Language Instinct, and the forthcoming How the Mind Works (Norton).

/3rd_culture/pinker/pinker_p1.html

I see the mind as an exquisitely engineered device—not literally engineered, of course, but designed by the mimic of engineering that we see in nature, natural selection. That's what "engineered" animals' bodies to accomplish improbable feats, like flying and swimming and running, and it is surely what "engineered" the mind to accomplish its improbable feats.

THE REALITY CLUB

Responses to "Organs of Computation" by: Steven Mithen, Steven Quartz, Nicholas Humphrey, Patricia S. Churchland, Sandra Blakeslee

Rejoinder by Steven Pinker

Further Responses by Nicholas Humphrey and Richard Potts

EDGE 4
January 17, 1997

"THE CHEF"
A Talk with Nathan Myhrvold

/digerati/myhrvold/myhrvold_p1.html

NATHAN MYHRVOLD is chief technology officer at Microsoft corporation, reporting to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as a member of the Executive Committee. This group is responsible for the broad strategic and business planning for the entire company. He also is responsible for the Advanced Technology and Research Group, which has a budget of more than $2 billion a year. Previously he was group vice president of Applications and Content, which comprised a number of Microsoft divisions, including Desktop Applications, Consumer, Research, and Microsoft On-line Systems.

The most interesting aspect of the Internet is none of the technology features; it's putting people in communication with one another, very broadly. Whether that's through Web sites that allow people to publish to a large audience with amazing efficiency and lower cost per unit people that you communicate with; or it's email or chat or other means to put people in more direct two-way communication. The strength of the Internet is with what people will do with that communication capability.

THE REALITY CLUB

Responses to "The Chef" (Nathan Myhrvold) by Lew Tucker and Steve Lohr

Steven Pinker Responds to Nicholas Humphrey and Richard Potts

David Lykken on Organs of Computation, A Talk by Steven Pinker"

EDGE 5
February 10, 1997

"WHAT KIND OF A THING IS A NUMBER?"
A Talk With Reuben Hersh

/3rd_culture/hersh/hersh_p1.html

REUBEN HERSH is professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He is the recipient (with Martin Davis) of the Chauvenet Prize and (with Edgar Lorch) the Ford Prize. Hersh is the author (with Philip J. Davis) of The Mathematical Experience, winner of the National Book Award in 1983. His new book, What is Mathematics, Really?, is forthcoming (Oxford).

What is mathematics? It's neither physical nor mental, it's social. It's part of culture, it's part of history. It's like law, like religion, like money, like all those other things which are very real, but only as part of collective human consciousness. That's what math is.

THE REALITY CLUB

Charles Simonyi and Stanislas Dehaene on Reuben Hersh

Steven Pinker responds to David Lykken

Philip Leggiere on Nathan Myhrvold

EDGE 6
February 17, 1997

"PARALLEL MEMORIES: PUTTING EMOTIONS BACK INTO THE BRAIN"
A Talk with Joseph Ledoux

/3rd_culture/ledoux/ledoux_p1.html

We have to put emotion back into the brain and integrate it with cognitive systems. We shouldn't study emotion or cognition in isolation, but should study both as aspects of the mind in its brain.

JOSEPH LEDOUX is a Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University. He is the author of the recently published The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, coauthor (with Michael Gazzaniga) of The Integrated Mind, and editor with W. Hirst of Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience.

THE REALITY CLUB

Reuben Hersh's Rejoinders to Rebuttals by Simonyi and Dehaene

Paolo Pignatelli on Stanislas Dehaene

Lee Smolin, W. Daniel Hillis, Jaron Lanier on Rueben Hersh

Esther Dyson on Nathan Myhrvold

EDGE 7
February 25, 1997

"THE CURATOR"
A Talk with Doug Rowan

/digerati/rowan/rowan_p1.html

What's new is that the whole premise of Corbis is to take pictures, put them in a digital form, and make the access to them, that is the search and finding and use of them, quite different from the prior model of the way pictures were used, which was in film form. So everything at Corbis is about digital. The pictures are digital, the data is digital, the access is digital. The customer search is digital, the viewing of the potential selections, whether it be for entertainment, education, or professional licensing use-these are all digital. It is of a size that is unique, and the very nature of the way the pictures are organized is quite unique.

DOUG ROWAN is the former president and CEO of Corbis Corporation, in Bellevue, Washington. Doug joined Corbis Corporation in early 1994 after 30+ years in the computer industry. After a BSEE and MBA from Cornell, Doug joined IBM where he held a number of sales, marketing and marketing management positions over a 22 year period. Doug left IBM in 1984 to join MASSCOMP as VP of Marketing, Sales and Service. After a similar position at Ampex, Doug joined AXS as President. AXS was a pioneer in software and rights for the new digital content industry.

THE REALITY CLUB

Doug Rowan on Nathan Myhrvold, Denise Caruso, Bill Gates, Jaron Lanier, Linda Stone, Bob Stein, Richard Wurman

George Johnson on Reuben Hersh's "What Kind of Thing is a Number"

William H. Calvin, Doulgas Rushkoff, Paolo Pignatelli, and W. Daniel Hillis on Joseph LeDoux's "Parallel Memories: Putting Emotions Back Into The Brain"

EDGE 8
March 4, 1997

"COMPLEXITY AND CATASTROPHE"
A Talk with Sir John Maddox

/3rd_culture/maddox/maddox_p1.html

"My guess is that if the question of human extinction is ever posed clearly, people will say that it's all very well to say we've been a part of nature up to now, but at that turning point in the human race's history, it is surely essential that we do something about it; that we fix the genome, to get rid of the disease that's causing the instability, if necessary we clone people known to be free from the risk, because that's the only way in which we can keep the human race alive. A still, small voice may at that stage ask, but what right does the human race have to claim precedence for itself. To which my guess is the full-throated answer would be, sorry, the human race has taken a decision, and that decision is to survive. And, if you like, the hell with the rest of the ecosystem."

JOHN MADDOX, who recently retired having served 23 years as the editor of Nature, is 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 the forthcoming What Remains to be Discovered: The Agenda for Science in the Next Century (The Free Press,US; Macmillan, UK).

THE REALITY CLUB

Ian Stewart on Reuben Hersh

Daniel Goleman on Joseph LeDoux

Steven Pinker on Joseph LeDoux

Joesph Ledoux Responds to Daniel Goleman, Douglas Rushkoff, William Calvin, Paolo Pignatelli, and Steven Pinker

EDGE 9
March 11, 1997

"THE UNKNOWN AND THE UNKNOWABLE"
A Talk with Joseph Traub

/3rd_culture/traub/traub_p1.html

A central issue is the relation between reality and models of reality. I like to talk about this in terms of four worlds. There are two real worlds: the world of natural phenomena and the computer world, where simulations and calculations are performed. There are two model worlds: a mathematical model of a natural phenomenon and a model of computation. The mathematical model is an abstraction of the natural world while the model of computation is an abstraction of a physical computer.

JOSEPH TRAUB is the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was founding Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 1979 to 1989, and founding chair of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences from 1986 to 1992. From 1971 to 1979 he was Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University. Traub is the founding editor of the Journal of Complexity and an associate editor of Complexity. A Festschrift in celebration of his sixtieth birthday was recently published. He is currently writing his ninth book, Information and Complexity, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

THE REALITY CLUB

/digerati/misc/index.html

"Upside, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourselves...": John Perry Barlow, Stewart Brand, Dave Winer, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Marvin Minsky, Paul Keegan, David Bunnell

Paolo Pignatelli: Further Questions for Joseph Ledoux

EDGE 10
March 20, 1997

"A POSSIBLE SOLUTION FOR THE PROBLEM OF TIME IN QUANTUM COSMOLOGY"
Stuart Kauffman & Lee Smolin

/3rd_culture/smolin/smolin_p1.html

"We argue that in classical and quantum theories of gravity the configuration space and Hilbert space may not be constructible through any finite procedure. If this is the case then the "problem of time" in quantum cosmology may be a pseudoproblem, because the argument that time disappears from the theory depends on constructions that cannot be realized by any finite beings that live in the universe. We propose an alternative formulation of quantum cosmological theories in which it is only necessary to predict the amplitudes for any given state to evolve to a finite number of possible successor states. The space of accessible states of the system is then constructed as the universe evolves from any initial state. In this kind of formulation of quantum cosmology time and causality are built in at the fundamental level."

STUART KAUFFMAN is a biologist; professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute; author of Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford), and At Home in the Universe (Oxford).

LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist; professor of physics and member of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University; author of The Life of The Cosmos (Oxford).

THE REALITY CLUB

"Reality Distortion Field" Flamefest: David Bunnell, John Perry Barlow, Richard Saul Wurman

Lee Smolin, Murray Gell-Mann, and Julian Barbour on Time in Quamtum Cosmology

EDGE 11
April 1, 1997

"A BIG THEORY OF CULTURE"
A Talk With Brian Eno
Introduction By Stewart Brand

/3rd_culture/eno/eno_p1.html

What is cultural value and how does that come about? Nearly all of the history of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn't like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It's the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: no, it's us. It's us who make those meanings.

BRIAN ENO studied art prior to moving to London in 1969 to join Roxy records where he began making and producing records.In the late 1970s he picked up his visual art activities again and began making installations with light, video, slides, and sound. He has produced U2, Talking Heads and Devo and collaborated with David Bowie, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson. Over the past 10 years he has had 10 group shows and 33 individual shows of his audio/video installations in cities throughout the world. He is the author of A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber & Faber).

THE REALITY CLUB

Richard Saul Wurman on John Perry Barlow

Stuart Hameroff, Philip Anderson, Murray Gell-Mann on Stuart Kauffman & Lee Smolin

Lee Smolin responds to Gell-Mann, Barbour, Hameroff, Anderson

EDGE 12
April 7, 1997

THE REALITY CLUB

John Horgan, Stuart Hameroff, John Baez, Stewart Brand on "A Possible Solution for the Problem of Time in Quantum Cosmology" by Stuart Kauffman & Lee Smolin

(John Horgan:) I coined the phrase ironic science in my book "The End of Science" to refer to theories that can never possibly be verified through empirical means. Such theories are ironic in the sense that they cannot, and should not, be taken literally; they are thus more akin to literary criticism, theology and philosophy than to real science.

Lee Smolin Responds

Horgan's concerns are not stupid, science is at a very interesting point, and it is not obvious that good science can be done now about some of the key issues that confront us, concerning quantum gravity, the selection of the parameters of particle physics, the initial conditions in cosmology, as well as questions from biology such as the origin of life. But what I am contending is that in spite of the superficial reasons why one might worry that progress cannot be made on these issues, progress is in fact being made.

Marc Hauser, Jaron Lanier, Marney Morris, Clifford Pickover, Douglas Rushkoff, Pamela McCorduck on "A Big Theory Of Culture" by Brian Eno

(Douglas Rushkoff:) In a sense, the language of art is the opposite of Darwin's language of survival and competition. Art provides commonality, communication, and world sharing. It's a ritualized form of compromise — you wrap your brain around my short story and I wrap my brain around your sonata. The recipient or auditor is in an act of surrender, or ritualized surrender to the artist. The ritual simply means that there is a prior agreement that nothing "real" will happen. Like break dancing or rap face-offs it's a conflict or competition avoidance. (Likewise, the artist using chaos or fractals in his work is less making an assertion or proving a theorem than asking us to "suppose" something.)

EDGE 13
April 15, 1997

"JAPAN, INC. MEETS THE DIGERATI"
A Talk with with Izumi Aizu ("The Bridge")

/digerati/izumi/izumi_p1.html

The Japanese companies or business societies often form delegations, or study groups, to the U.S. or Europe. It's not so much about interaction as trying to absorb what's going on there, take it back, and use what we can from the experience. This tour has a very unique, strange setup. Officially, for international consumption, it's the Keidenren Tour. Domestically it's a quiet tour — they cannot present it as Keidenren.

IZUMI AIZU is the Research Manager at the Institute for Hypernetwork Society, Tokyo, and the Planning Manager at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan in Tokyo. On April 11, he moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

THE REALITY CLUB

Tim Race to The Editor

George Johnson and Kevin Kelly on John Horgan

Lee Smolin Responds to Brian Eno, John Baez, Stewart Brand

Stuart Kauffman Responds to Phil Anderson

Julian Barbour Responds to John Baez, Murray Gell-Mann, Lee Smolin

Pamela Mccorduck on Brian Eno

EDGE 14
April 23, 1997

"WHY DID HUMAN HISTORY UNFOLD DIFFERENTLY ON DIFFERENT CONTINENTS FOR THE LAST 13,000 YEARS?"
A Talk with Jared Diamond

/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p1.html

I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics.

JARED DIAMOND is Professor of Physiology, UCLA Medical School, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of The Third Chimpanzee (Winner, British Science Book Prize and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and the recently published Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton).

EDGE 15
April 29, 1997

"A NEW SCIENCE OF QUALITIES"
A Talk with Brian Goodwin

/3rd_culture/goodwin/goodwin_p1.html

Goethe as an artist knew that intuition was terribly important for organizing the data that we accumulate through sensory perception. We need a balance between the analytical way of knowing and the intuitive way of knowing, both of which can be cultivated systematically. In our educational system today, we focus on the analytical, and we just leave the intuitive alone. In fact we tend to deny or ignore it. Just as we've been kicking shit out of Nature for 400 years, we've been doing the same to that part of our own nature that we call subjectivity or intuition.

BRIAN GOODWIN, a biologist, is a Scholar in Residence at Schumacher College, and the author of Temporal Organization in Cells, Analytical Physiology, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, and Form and Transformation, a new book written with Gerry Webster. Dr. Goodwin is a member of the Santa Fe Institute.

EDGE 16
May 6, 1997

"WHY I THINK SCIENCE IS ENDING"
A Talk by John Horgan

/3rd_culture/horgan/horgan_p1.html

Over the few months during which I've been following this website, various contributors have said various things about my book "The End of Science". These comments reflect some confusion about what it was that I really said. I therefore thought it might be useful for me to present a succinct summary of my end-of-science argument as well as a rebuttal of 10 common counter-arguments.

JOHN HORGAN, senior writer for Scientific American, has also written freelance articles for The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, The London Times, Discover, The Sciences and other publications. Horgan is the author of The End Of Science : Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age (Helix Books, 1966; paperback: Broadway Books, May, 1997).

THE REALITY CLUB

John Horgan Responds to Kevin Kelly and George Johnson

Kevin Kelly, George Johnson, Ernest B. Hook, Paul Davies, and Lee Smolin on Horgan

EDGE 17
May 12, 1997

THE REALITY CLUB

Timothy Taylor, Marc D. Hauser, Kevin Kelly, George Dyson, Clifford Pickover. Pamela McCorduck, Gregory Benford on Jared Diamond's "Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?"

Jared Diamond's Reflections on Other Peoples' Reflections on Jared Diamond's Talk

The End of Horgan? Jaron Lanier, George Dyson, Oliver Morton, John Gribbin on John Horgan's "Why I Think Science Is Ending"

Clifford Pickover on Joseph Traub's "The Unknown and The Unknowable"

EDGE 18
MAY 19, 1997

"ENGINEERING FORMALISM AND ARTISTRY: THE YIN AND YANG OF MULTIMEDIA"
A Talk with Luyen Chou ("The Mandarin")

/digerati/chou/chou_p1.html

What we've been struggling with as designers is, what makes education and scholarship really fun? What we keep coming back to is that real scholarship is like mystery work. When you're a scholar, what you're doing is, you're like an archeologist, you're piecing together clues — constituent clues — and you're trying to create a picture that makes sense. You're starting with constituent pieces and you're trying to construct a story.

LUYEN CHOU is President and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive in New York City, an interactive media developer and publisher.

THE REALITY CLUB

The End of Horgan: John Horgan's rejoinders to the responses of Kevin Kelly, George Johnson, Ernest B. Hook, Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier, George Dyson and Oliver Morton

Arnold Trehub & Steven Quartz on "Organs of Computation"

EDGE 19
May 30, 1997

"HE CONFUSES L AND 2 THE 200 I.Q."
Mr. Byars By Mr. Brockman

/3rd_culture/byars/byars_p1.html

1. He confuses 1 and 2 the 200 IQ.
3. Wears his hat to deny his head.
6. Is self-conscious option enough?
8. All of his publicity improves with xerography. Does that have anything to do with evolution?
78. Numbers don't count ?
95. Epitaph: kicking the shit out of physical phenomena.

JAMES LEE BYARS (the late) was an internationally renowned artist whose work concentrated on minimal hermetic forms, reduction towards essence and absence, and an acute sense of the ephemeral.

THE REALITY CLUB

Steven Pinker - Arnold Trehub - Steven Quartz on "Organs of Computation"

EDGE 20
June 23, 1997

"INTENTIONAL PROGRAMMING"
A Talk with Charles Simonyi ("The WYSIWYG")

/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p1.html

The "first law" of intentional programming says: For every abstraction one should be able to define an equal and opposite "concretion". So repeated abstraction or parameterization need no longer create "Turing tarpits" where everything eventually grinds to a halt due to the overhead introduced by the layers. In IP, the enzymes associated by the abstractions can optimize out the overhead, based on the enzymes' domain specific knowledge. The overhead associated with abstraction has always been the bane of the very-high-level languages in the past.

CHARLES SIMONYI, Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation, joined Microsoft in 1981 to start the development of microcomputer application programs. He hired and managed teams who developed Microsoft Excel, Multiplan, Word, and other applications. In 1991, he moved on to Microsoft Research where he focused on Intentional Programming, an "ecology for abstractions" which strives for maximal reuse of components by separating high level intentions from implementation detail.

THE REALITY CLUB

Alun Anderson, John Maddox, Lee Smolin

Arnold Trehub & Steven Quartz on "Organs of Computation"

EDGE 21
July 8, 1997

DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES;
OR, THE ORIGINS OF [ARTIFICIAL] LIFE
A Presentation by George Dyson

/3rd_culture/dyson/dyson_p1.html

In examining the prospects for artificial intelligence and artificial life Samuel Butler (1835-1902) faced the same mysteries that permeate these two subjects today. "I first asked myself whether life might not, after all, resolve itself into the complexity of arrangement of an inconceivably intricate mechanism," he recalled in 1880, retracing the development of his ideas. "If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only machines of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of mechanism was 'being alive,' why should not machines ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all to be? If it was only a case of their becoming more complicated, we were certainly doing our best to make them so."

GEORGE DYSON, the leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut kayaks, has been a subject of the PBS television show Scientific American Frontiers. He is the author of Baidarka, and the forthcoming Darwin Among the Machines:The Evolution of Global Intelligence.

THE REALITY CLUB

Responses to George Dyson by Daniel C. Dennett, Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier & Tim Race

Daniel C. Dennett, Jaron Lanier & Paolo Pignatelli on Charles Simonyi's "Intentional Programming"

Piet Hut & Lee Smolin: An Exchange

LETTERS

Lawrence Wilkinson & Stewart Brand

EDGE 22
July 17, 1997

THE REALITY CLUB

Charles Simonyi Responds to Daniel C. Dennett

My favorite example for the relationship between the ephemeral and the invariant is "grandpa's ax". When the handle broke, it was replaced. Later the blade rusted away so a new blade was fitted. Of course grandpa - long departed, bless his soul - was Hungarian, so we were really talking about "nagyapu fejszeje". So everything in this story - including the language used - is ephemeral, yet there is an invariant. Intentions let you represent that invariance.

Piet Hut Responds to Lee Smolin

Kevin Kelly, Clifford Pickover, Oliver Sacks, Hans-Joachim Metzger & Christopher G. Langton on George Dyson's "Darwin Among The Machines"

George Dyson Responds

Which brings me back to the question of models, and the epigraph I chose for the chapter on Nils Barricelli. It's a statement made by Marvin Minsky, at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Yerevan, Armenia, at the 1971 conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence: "Instead of sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which we can send the cat itself."

Women and EDGE: Carl Djerassi & Natalie Angier

Marney Morris, Seth Lloyd, Christa Maar on "He Confuses 1 and 2 the 200 I.Q.", Mr. Byars by Mr. Brockman

PEOPLE

IZUMI AIZU is the Research Manager at the Institute for Hypernetwork Society, Tokyo, and the Planning Manager at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan in Tokyo. On April 11, he moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

ALUN ANDERSON is the editor of New Scientist.

PHILIP ANDERSON is a Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and one of the leading theorists on superconductivity.

NATALIE ANGIER, a science writer for The New York Times, has won the Pulitzer Prize and the Lewis Thomas Award, among others. She is the author of Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene and The Beauty of the Beastly : New Views on the Nature of Life. Her articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Discover, Parade, and elsewhere.

JOHN BAEZ is a mathematical physicist working on quantum gravity using the techniques of "higher-dimensional algebra". A professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside, he enjoys answering physics questions on the usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research, and also writes a regular column entitled "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics" ( http: //math.ucr.edu/home/baez ).

JULIAN BARBOUR, a theoretical physicist, is the author of Absolute or Relative Motion? The Discovery of Dynamics and The Frame of Mind (Cambridge) and the editor of Mach's Principle: From Newton's Bucket to Quantum Gravity (Birkhauser).

JOHN PERRY BARLOW is cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and a former Wyoming cattle rancher.

GREGORY BENFORD is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Timescape.

SANDRA BLAKESLEE is an award-winning science writer for the New York Times. For the last ten years, she has carved out a specialty in neuroscience, although her "Science Times" articles cover many topics. She is coauthor, with Dr. Judith Wallerstein, of the 1986 bestseller Second Chances and the 1995 book The Good Marriage, How and Why Love Lasts. Her next book, coauthored with Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran is The Phantom Within (forthcoming).

STEWART BRAND is founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, and author of The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987) and How Buildings Learn (1994).

DAVID BUNNELL, founder of PC Magazine, PC World, MacWorld, Personal Computing, and New Media, is CEO and publisher of Upside.

JAMES LEE BYARS (the late) was an internationally renowned artist whose work concentrated on minimal hermetic forms, reduction towards essence and absence, and an acute sense of the ephemeral.

WILLIAM H. CALVIN is a theoretical neurophysiologist on the faculty of the University of Washington School of Medicine who writes about the brain and evolution. He is the author of The Throwing Madonna, The Cerebral Symphony, The Ascent of Mind, The River That Flows Uphill, How the Shaman Stole the Moon, Conversations with Neil's Brain with neurosurgeon George Ojemann, The Cerebral Code, and the Science Masters Series title, How Brains Think. His October 1994 article for the 150th anniversary issue of Scientific American explores "The Emergence of Intelligence."

LUYEN CHOU is President and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive in New York City, an interactive media developer and publisher.

PATRICIA S. CHURCHLAND is a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego and the author (with Terrence J. Sejnowski) The Computational Brain , and Neurophilosophy : Toward a Unified Science of Mind-Brain.

PAUL DAVIES, described by the Washington Times as "the best science writer on either side of the Atlantic," is a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and author of more than 20 books including The Mind of God, Are We Alone, The Last Three Minutes (Science Masters Series) andAbout Time which was shortlisted for the 1996 British Book Prize. In 1995 Davies was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress in religion, the world's largest prize for intellectual endeavor. In 1995 he presented his own six-part television series for Australian television entitled "The Big Questions." Davies's commitment to bring science to the wider public includes a heavy program of public lecturing in Australia, Europe and the US.

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene (1976, 2d ed. 1989), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995), and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). Link: The Unofficial Dawkins Website — http://www.spacelab.net/~catalj/ .

STANISLAS DEHAENE, , a researcher at the Institut National de la Santé, studies cognitive neuropsychology of language and number processing in the human brain. He was awarded a masters degree in applied mathematics and computer science from the University of Paris in 1985 and then earned a doctoral degree in cognitive psychology in 1989 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge is Embedded in Our Brains, forthcoming (Oxford).

DANIEL C. DENNETT, a philosopher, is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, and Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University. He is author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Consciousness Explained, Brainstorms, and coauthor with Douglas Hofstadter of The Mind's I.

JARED DIAMOND is Professor of Physiology, UCLA Medical School, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of The Third Chimpanzee (Winner, British Science Book Prize and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and the recently published Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton).

CARL DJERASSI of Stanford University — the scientist who brought you the Pill — is now bringing you "science-in-fiction." His books include Cantor's Dilemma, The Bourbaki Gambit and the forthcoming Menachem's Seed.

JOHN DOERR is a venture capitalist and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who has sponsored a series of investments (Compaq, Cypress, Intuit, Macromedia, Lotus, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Symantec) that led to the creation of over 30,000 jobs. Doerr was the founding CEO of Silicon Compilers. He serves on the Board of Directors of Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Platinum, Shiva, Sun Microsystems, Academic Systems, The Lightspan Partnership, MNI Interactive, Amazon.com and Precept Software.

JOHN C. DVORAK is a columnist for PC Magazine, PC/Computing, and Boardwatch; the host of Real Computing, a radio program broadcast on one hundred public stations; and the software reviewer for C-Net Central, a nationwide cable TV show.

ESTHER DYSON is president of EDventure Holdings and editor of Release 1.0. Her PC Forum conference is an annual industry event.

GEORGE DYSON, the leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut kayaks, has been a subject of the PBS television show Scientific American Frontiers.
He is the author of Baidarka, and the forthcoming Darwin Among the Machines:The Evolution of Global Intelligence.

BRIAN ENO studied art prior to moving to London in 1969 to join Roxy records where he began making and producing records.In the late 1970s he picked up his visual art activities again and began making installations with light, video, slides, and sound. He has produced U2, Talking Heads and Devo and collaborated with David Bowie, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson. Over the past 10 years he has had 10 group shows and 33 individual shows of his audio/video installations in cities throughout the world. He is the author of A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber & Faber).

MURRAY GELL-MANN is a theoretical physicist; Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology; winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics; a cofounder of the Santa Fe Institute, where he is a professor and cochairman of the science board; a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation; one of the Global Five Hundred honored by the U.N. Environment Program; a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology; author of The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (1994).

MARCELO GLEISER, a Brazilian physicist, is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College where he runs a very active cosmology group. His work in theoretical physics focuses on the dynamical processes that took place during the very early universe. As such, it brings together particle physics, the study of the very small, and cosmology, the study of the very large. As a result, he has recently been selected to receive the prestigious Presidential Faculty Fellows Award, jointly given by the National Science Foundation and the White House. He is the author of The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang.

MIKE GODWIN, an attorney, is counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based cyber-liberties organization.

DANIEL GOLEMAN is a psychologist and award-winning writer who covers the behavioral and brain sciences for the New York Times, and is the author of numerous books including Vital Lies, Simple Truths, The Meditative Mind, the international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, and coauthor of The Consumer's Guide to Psychotherapy. He has taught at Harvard University and was previously senior editor of Psychology Today.

BRIAN GOODWIN, a biologist, is a Scholar in Residence at Schumacher College, and the author of Temporal Organization in Cells, Analytical Physiology, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, and Form and Transformation, a new book written with Gerry Webster. Dr. Goodwin is a member of the Santa Fe Institute.

JOHN GRIBBIN is a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. He elaborates on these themes in his books In the Beginning (Penguin) and Companion to the Cosmos (Phoenix).

STUART HAMEROFF, MD is Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, University of Arizona, and a collaborator with Roger Penrose in proposing a specific model (orchestrated objective reduction). In 1996 he coorganized an international, multidisciplinary conference "Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness" held at the University of Arizona. He is coeditor of Toward a Science of Consciousness — The First Tucson Discussions and Debates.

MARC D. HAUSER, is an evolutionary psychologist, and an associate professor at Harvard University where he is a fellow of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. With wide-ranging post-doctoral experience in neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, he is a professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychology, as well as the Program in Neurosciences. Dr. Hauser works on both captive and wild monkeys and apes as well as collaborative work on human infants. His research focuses on problems of acoustic perception, the generation of beliefs, the neurobiology of acoustic and visual signal processing, and the evolution of communication. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication (MIT Press), and What The Serpent Said: How Animals Think And What They Think About (Henry Holt, forthcoming).

REUBEN HERSH is professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He is the recipient (with Martin Davis) of the Chauvenet Prize and (with Edgar Lorch) the Ford Prize. Hersh is the author (with Philip J. Davis) of The Mathematical Experience, winner of the National Book Award in 1983. His new book, What is Mathematics, Really?, is forthcoming (Oxford).

W. DANIEL HILLIS is vice president of research and development at the Walt Disney Company and a Disney Fellow. He was cofounder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation.

ERNEST B. HOOK is Professor, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley.

JOHN HORGAN, senior writer for Scientific American, has also written freelance articles for The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, The London Times, Discover, The Sciences and other publications. Horgan is the author of The End Of Science : Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age (Helix Books, 1966; paperback: Broadway Books, May, 1997).

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist; professor at the New School for Social Research, New York; author of Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Soul Searching.

PIET HUT is professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, since 1985. Not satisfied with the performance of existing computers, he joined a group of astronomers in Tokyo to develop a special-purpose computer for star cluster simulations, the GRAPE-4, at 1 Teraflops the world's fastest computer in 1995. He is now working with them to produce and use a Petaflops- class machine by the year 2000.

GEORGE JOHNSON is a writer, The New York Times, working on contract from Santa Fe, January 1995 to present. He formerly worked as Staff Editor, "The Week in Review", The New York Times, December 1986 to October 1994. His books include Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (1995); In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads (1991); and Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence (1986).

STUART KAUFFMAN is a biologist; professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute; author of Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford), and At Home in the Universe (Oxford).

PAUL KEEGAN has written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Philadelphia, GQ, Outside, Men's Journal, and Upside, among others. He is also a contributing editor at Details.

KEVIN KELLY, executive editor of Wired magazine, is the author of Out of Control.

CHRISTOPHER G. LANGTON is a computer scientist; visiting professor at the Santa Fe Institute; director of the institute's artificial-life program; editor of the journal Artificial Life.

JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL.

JOSEPH LEDOUX is a Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University. He is the author of the recently published The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, coauthor (with Michael Gazzaniga) of The Integrated Mind, and editor with W. Hirst of Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience.

PHILIP LEGGIERE is a journalist and cultural critic whose work appears in Salon, The Village Voice, Boston Review, Wired and other periodicals.

TED LEONSIS is president of the America Online Services Company.

STEVE LOHR is a technology reporter for The New York Times.

SETH LLOYD is assistant professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and adjunct assistant professor at the Santa Fe Institute. 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?

DAVID T. LYKKEN is a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota who recently published the results of a study of 1500 pairs of twins in the May issue of Psychological Science. He is the proponent of a set-point theory of happiness, the idea that one's sense of well being is half determined by genetics and half determined by circumstances. His research illustrates that a person's baseline levels of cheerfulness, contentment, and psychological satisfaction are largely a matter of heredity.

CHRISTA MAAR, an art historian and journalist, is president of the Academy of the Third Millennium, a Munich-based interdisciplinary institute which was founded in Munich in 1994 by publisher Dr. Huburt Burda. The Academy deals with important future questions and bringing together for debate personalities from science, business, art, and the media.

JOHN MADDOX, who recently retired having served 23 years as the editor of Nature, is 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 the forthcoming What Remains to be Discovered: The Agenda for Science in the Next Century (The Free Press,US; Macmillan, UK).

PAMELA McCORDUCK is the author or coauthor of seven published books, among them Machines Who Think, The Fifth Generation, and coauthor with Nancy Ramsey of The Futures Of Women.

SCOTT MCNEALY is the cofounder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

HANS-JOACHIM METZGER developed an interest in translation and, in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, specialized in translating mostly untranslatable books and/or essays by, amongst others, Derrida, Foucault, Blanchot, Gödel, Feynman and Glenn Gould. Also, until very recently, I have been co-editor and translator of the German edition of the writings and lectures of Jacques Lacan.

MARVIN MINSKY is a mathematician and computer scientist; Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; cofounder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Logo Computer Systems, Inc., and Thinking Machines, Inc.; laureate of the Japan Prize (1990), that nation's highest distinction in science and technology; author
of eight books, including The Society of Mind.

STEVEN MITHEN is a lecturer in archaeology at Reading University U.K., currently engaged in excavations of prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlements in Western Scotland and Jordan. His most recent book was The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames & Hudson, 1996).

MARNEY MORRIS, founded Animatrix (http://www.animatrix.com) in 1984. A low profile but very successful interactive design company, Animatrix, based in Palo Alto, created the first guided tour for the Macintosh. Clients include AT&T, Kodak, Chase Manhattan Bank, The Limited, Clinique, Microsoft. Morris has a BS in Animal Physiology from University of California at Davis; a BFA in art From University of California at Santa Cruz. She designed the first t-shirt to ever sell 1 million units.

OLIVER MORTON is a freelance writer, and a contributing editor at Wired and Newsweek International. He used to edit Wired UK, and previously worked at The Economist, spending almost five years as Science and Technology Editor.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD is chief technology officer at Microsoft corporation, reporting to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as a member of the Executive Committee. This group is responsible for the broad strategic and business planning for the entire company. He also is responsible for the Advanced Technology and Research Group, which has a budget of more than $2 billion a year. Previously he was group vice president of Applications and Content, which comprised a number of Microsoft divisions, including Desktop Applications, Consumer, Research, and Microsoft On-line Systems.

CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER, research staff member at the IBM Watson Research Center, received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is the author of numerous highly-acclaimed books melding astronomy, mathematics, art, computers, creativity, and other seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor. Pickover holds several patents, and is associate editor for various scientific journals. He is also the lead columnist for the brain-boggler column in Discover magazine.

PAOLO PIGNATELLI, a cyber-entrepreneur, is proprietor of the virtual Corner Store. He is a linguist, translator and scientist who previously worked in image processing algorithms at Bell Labs.

STEVEN PINKER is professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language Development, Learnability and Cognition, The Language Instinct, and the forthcoming How the Mind Works (Norton).

MARGIE PROFET is an evolutionary biologist whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Science Times, Time, Newsweek, Mirabella, People, Omni, and The Economist. Her research on the function of pregnancy sickness attracted national and international attention; she won a MacArthur "Genius" award for her work. She is the author of Protecting Your Baby-to-Be: Preventing Birth Defects in the First Trimester.

STEVEN R. QUARTZ, a fellow of the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at the Salk Institute, has also been a member of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory since 1988. He has advised the National Science Foundation on computational neurobiology-the use of parallel simulations to study development of the brain. Dr. Quartz is the coauthor (with Terrence Sejnowski) of The Intelligent Brain: Shattering the Myth of Fixed IQ with the Mind's Newest Science (forthcoming).

TIM RACE is business technology editor for The New York Times where he oversees a group of the nation's best technology writers—including Denise Caruso, Mark Landler, Lawrence M. Fisher, Steve Lohr, John Markoff, Seth Schiesel and Laurence Zuckerman—and is privy to the latest technological trends and developments well before the reading public becomes aware of them.

DOUG ROWAN is the former president and CEO of Corbis Corporation, in Bellevue, Washington. Doug joined Corbis Corporation in early 1994 after 30+ years in the computer industry. After a BSEE and MBA from Cornell, Doug joined IBM where he held a number of sales, marketing and marketing management positions over a 22 year period. Doug left IBM in 1984 to join MASSCOMP as VP of Marketing, Sales and Service. After a similar position at Ampex, Doug joined AXS as President. AXS was a pioneer in software and rights for the new digital content industry.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author of Cyberia, Media Virus, and the upcoming novel Ecstasy Club.

KARL SABBAGH is a writer and television producer with 25 years of experience describing complex events and subjects for a nonspecialist audience. His programs for the BBC and PBS have encompassed physics, medicine, psychology, philosophy, technology, and anthropology. Three of his television projects have been accompanied by books: The Living Body, Skyscraper, and 21st Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777. Sabbagh has written numerous articles for newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times, New Scientist, The Listener, and Punch. He has also hosted a regular BBC radio series called Science Now.

OLIVER SACKS, a physician and a writer, is the author of Awakenings, Migraine, A Leg to Stand On, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars : Seven Paradoxical Tales.

TERRENCE SEJNOWSKI, a pioneer in Computational Neurobiology, is regarded by many as one of the world's most foremost theoretical brain scientist. He is currently now the director of the Computational Neurobiology Lab at the Salk Institute. He is the coauthor of The Computational Brain and has published over 250 scientific articles. His next book(with Steven Quartz) is The Intelligent Brain: Shattering the Myth of Fixed IQ with the Mind's Newest Science.

RICHARD SHAFFER is founder of Technologic Partners and publiser and editor of The Computer Letter.

ROBERT SHAPIRO is professor of Chemistry at New York University and an expert on DNA research and the genetic effect of environmental chemicals. He is coauthor, with the late physicistGerald Feinberg, of Life Beyond Earth (William Morrow) which was, according to the New York Times , "one of the best books on earth about life elsewhere," and the author of Origins (Simon & Schuster).

CHARLES SIMONYI, Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation, joined Microsoft in 1981 to start the development of microcomputer application programs. He hired and managed teams who developed Microsoft Excel, Multiplan, Word, and other applications. In 1991, he moved on to Microsoft Research where he focused on Intentional Programming, an "ecology for abstractions" which strives for maximal reuse of components by separating high level intentions from implementation detail.

LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist; professor of physics and member of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University; author of The Life of The Cosmos (Oxford).

DUNCAN STEEL is a research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and a research fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia. A world-renowned authority on the comet hazard, he has served on both the Detection Committee and the Intercept Committee created by NASA to assess the threat of comet and asteroid collisions and investigate technologies to avert such impacts. He is the author of Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets. and he writes regularly for Sky and Space magazine.

IAN STEWART is the 1995 recipient of the Royal Society's Michael Faraday medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of science. He is author of Does God Play Dice?, The Problems of Mathematics, Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into, and Nature's Numbers. He writes the "Mathematical Recreations" column of Scientific American and is mathematics consultant to New Scientist and to Encyclopedia Britannica. He has written articles for such magazines as Discover, New Scientist and The Sciences. He lives in London.

TIMOTHY TAYLOR is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. He has been instrumental in popularizing archaeology on television, acting as a researcher on several BBC programs includingThe Blood of the British , and presenting his work on Down to Earth in an episode that won the British Archaeological Award for best popular archaeology on TV 1991-2. Dr. Taylor is the author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture (Bantam, Fourth Estate), and The Invention of Death: Cosmic Belief and Human Evolution (Fourth Estate).

ARNOLD TREHUB is adjunct professor of psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1972 and the author of The Cognitive Brain, MIT Press, 1991.

JOSEPH TRAUB is the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was founding Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 1979 to 1989, and founding chair of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences from 1986 to 1992. From 1971 to 1979 he was Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University. Traub is the founding editor of the Journal of Complexity and an associate editor of Complexity. A Festschrift in celebration of his sixtieth birthday was recently published. He is currently writing his ninth book, Information and Complexity, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

LEW TUCKER, trained as a biologist, is the former director of Advanced Development at Thinking Machines Corporation and is the director of JavaSoft's Corporate and ISV Relations for Sun Microsystems, Inc.

DAVE WINER is a software developer and the publisher of DaveNet.

LAWRENCE WILKINSON is cofounder, president, and CEO of Global Business Network.
Before joining GBN full-time in 1990, Lawrence was president of Colossal Pictures, responsible for all activities of Colossal, its USFX division and Big Pictures subsidiary, and its affiliated companies globally.

MILFORD H. WOLPOFF is Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His work and theories on a "multiregional" model of human development challenge the popular "Eve" theory. His work has been covered in The New York Times, New Scientist, Discover, and Newsweek, among other publications. He is the author (with Rachel Caspari) of the forthcoming Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction.

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN is the chairman and creative director of the TED conferences. He is also an architect, a cartographer, the creator of the Access Travel Guide Series, and the author and designer of more than sixty books, including Information Architects (1996), Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1991) and Information Anxiety (1989).