"What is your heresy?"

I've noticed that the more scientifically educated a person is, the more likely they will harbor a quiet heresy. This is a strongly held belief that goes against the grain of their peers, something not in the accepted cannon of their friends and colleagues. Often the person finds it difficult to fully justify their own belief. It may or may not be believed by others outside their circle, that doesn't matter. What is important is that this view is not held by people they respect and admire. It's become almost a game for me to uncover a person's heresy because I've found that this unconventional view — held with much effort against the tide of their peer's views — tells me more about them than does the bulk of their well-thought out, well-reasoned, and well argued conventional views. The more unexpected the belief is, the more I like them.

Kevin Kelly is Editor-At-Large for Wired Magazine and author of New Rules for the New Economy.

"Universe or multiverse, that is the question?"

Of late, it is fashionable among leading physicists and cosmologists to suppose that alongside the physical world we see lies a stupendous array of alternative realities, some resembling our universe, others very different. The multiverse theory comes in several varieties, but in the most ambitious the "other universes" have different physical laws. Only in a tiny fraction of universes will the laws come out just right, by pure accident, for conscious beings such as ourselves to emerge and marvel at how bio-friendly their world appears.

The multiverse has replaced God as an explanation for the appearance of design in the structure of the physical world. Like God, the agency concerned lies beyond direct observation, inferred by inductive reasoning from the properties of the one universe we do see.

The meta-question is, does the existence of these other universes amount to more than an intellectual exercise? Can we ever discover that the hypothesized alternative universes are really there? If not, is the multiverse not simply theology dressed up in techno jargon? And finally, could there be a Third Way, in which the ingenious features of the universe are explained neither by an Infinite Designer Mind, nor by an Infinite Invisible Multiverse, but by an entirely new principle of explanation.

Paul Davies, a physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South Australia, is author of How to Build a Time Machine.

"Why do we ask questions?"

We all take for granted the fact that human beings ask questions and seek explanations, and that the questions they ask go far beyond their immediate practical concerns. But this insatiable human curiosity is actually quite puzzling. No other animal devotes as much time, energy and brain area to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Why? Is this drive for explanation restricted to the sophisticated professional questioners on this site? Or is it a deeper part of human nature?

Developmental research suggests that this drive for explanation is, in fact, in place very early in human life. We've all experienced the endless "whys?" of three-year-olds and the downright dangerous two-year-old determination to seek out strange new worlds and boldly go where no toddler has gone before. More careful analyses and experiments show that children's questions and explorations are strategically designed, in quite clever ways, to get the right kind of answers. In the case of human beings, evolution seems to have discovered that it's cost-effective to support basic research, instead of just funding directed applications. Human children are equipped with extremely powerful learning mechanisms, and a strong intrinsic drive to seek explanations. Moreover, they come with a support staff, — parents and other caregivers — who provide both lunch and references to the results of previous generations of human researchers.

But this preliminary answer prompts yet more questions. Why is it that in adult life, the same quest for explanatory truth so often seems to be satisfied by the falsehoods of superstition and religion? (Maybe we should think of these institutions as the cognitive equivalent of fast food. Fast food gives us the satisfying tastes of fat and sugar that were once evolutionary markers of good food sources, without the nourishment. Religion gives us the illusion of regularity and order, evolutionary markers of truth, without the substance.)

Why does this intrinsic truth-seeking drive seem to vanish so dramatically when children get to school? And, most important, how is it possible for children to get the right answers to so many questions so quickly? What are the mechanisms that allow human children to be the best learners in the known universe? Answering this question would not only tell us something crucial about human nature, it might give us new technologies that would allow even dumb adults to get better answers to our own questions.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and coauthor of The Scientist In The Crib.

"Do we want the God machine?"

The God machine is the name that journalists have given to a device invented by the Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger. It consists of a bunch of solenoids that, when strapped around the head, deliver pulses of electromagnetic radiation to specific regions of the brain. Persinger claims he can induce mystical visions by stimulating the temporal lobes, which have also been linked to religious experiences by other scientists, notably V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego.

Persinger's machine is actually quite crude. It induces peculiar perceptual distortions but no classic mystical experiences. But what if, through further advances in neuroscience and other fields, scientists invent a God machine that actually works, that delivers satori, nirvana, to anyone on command, without any negative side effects? It doesn't have to be an electromagnetic brain-stimulating device. It could be a drug, a type of brain surgery, a genetic modification, or some combination thereof.

One psychedelic researcher recently suggested to me that enlightenment could be spread around the world by an infectious virus that boosts the brain's production of dimethyltryptamine, a endogenous psychedelic that the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health detected in trace amounts in human brain tissue in 1972. But whatever form the God machine takes, it would be powerful enough to transform the world into what Robert Thurman, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism (and father of Uma), calls the "Buddhaverse," a mystical utopia in which everyone is enlightened.

The obvious followup question: Would the invention of a genuine God machine spell our salvation or doom?

John Horgan is a freelance writer and author of The Undiscovered Mind.

"What kind of system of 'coding' of semantic information does the brain use?"

My question now is actually a version of the question I was asking myself in the first year, and I must confess that I've had very little time to address it properly in the intervening years, since I've been preoccupied with other, more tractable issues. I've been mulling it over in the back of my mind, though, and I do hope to return to it in earnest in 2002.

What kind of system of "coding" of semantic information does the brain use? We have many tantalizing clues but no established model that comes close to exhibiting the molar behavior that is apparently being seen in the brain. In particular, we see plenty of evidence of a degree of semantic localization — neural assemblies over here are involved in cognition about faces and neural assemblies over there are involved in cognition about tools or artifacts, etc — and yet we also have evidence (unless we are misinterpreting it) that shows the importance of "spreading activation," in which neighboring regions are somehow enlisted to assist with currently active cognitive projects. But how could a region that specializes in, say, faces contribute at all to a task involving, say, food, or transportation or . . . . ? Do neurons have two (or more) modes of operation — specialized, "home territory" mode, in which their topic plays a key role, and generalized, "helping hand" mode, in which they work on other regions' topics?

Alternatively, is the semantic specialization we have observed an illusion — are these regions only circumstantially implicated in these characteristic topics because of some as-yet-unanalyzed generalized but idiosyncratic competence that happens to be invoked usually when those topics are at issue? (The mathematician's phone rings whenever the topic is budgets, but he knows nothing about money; he's just good at arithmetic.) Or, to consider another alternative, is "spreading activation" mainly just noisy leakage, playing no contributing role in the transformation of content? Or is it just "political" support, contributing no content but helping to keep competing projects suppressed for awhile? And finally, the properly philosophical question: what's wrong with these questions and what would better questions be?

Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

"'To be or not to be' remains the question"

The fact is that is "To be or not to be" is both a simple, perhaps the simplest, and a complex question, the hardest to sustain, let alone to ask. I ask it myself often — maybe as many times as five or six a week — and it is the asking, not any hope for an answer, that yields the most searing and immediate insight. I don't get it right every time, but when I do, I am thrown for a split second at the other side of being, the place where it begins.

But I can never retain that amazing feeling for long. What is required is a kind of radical pull-back of oneself from the most banal evidence of life and reality. Jean-Paul Sartre, after Shakespeare, was probably the thinker who framed the question best in his novels and philosophical treatises. The issue, however, is that this question is profoundly existential, not merely philosophical. It can be asked and should be by any living, thinking, sentient being, but cannot be answered.

There is huge energy and cognitive release to expect from it when it is properly framed. You have to somehow imagine that everything, absolutely everything has disappeared, or never was, that you have just happened upon your own circumstances by accident, the first accident of being. Another approach is to imagine sharply that anything that is, is a result of a warp, a blip in nothingness. It is not even a matter of finding out why or how, those demands are already far too elaborate. It is a crude, raw, brutal question followed by absolute, lightening speed amazement. And then the ordinary familiarity of all things known and named takes over, slipping your whole being into the stream of life, of being, with its attending problems and felicities. I feel strongly that there is a fundamental need for Shakespeare's question in every day life, but that is not what you and I were taught in school.

Derrick de Kerckhove is Director of the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto and author of Connected Intelligence.

"Would you choose universe Omega or Upsilon?"

Consider two universes. Universe Omega is a universe in which God does not exist, but the inhabitants of the universe believe God exists. Universe Upsilon is a universe in which God does exist, but no inhabitant believes God exists. In which universe would you prefer to live? In which universe do you think most people would prefer to live?

I recently posed this question to scientists, philosophers, and lay people. Some respondents suggested that if people think God exists, then God is sufficiently "real." A few individuals suggested that people would behave more humanely in a Universe where people believed in God. Yet others countered that an ethical system dependent on faith in a watchful, omniscient, or vengeful God is fragile and prone to collapse when doubt begins to undermine faith. A fuller listing of responses is in the book.

To me, the biggest challenge to answering this question is understanding what is meant by "God." Scientists sometimes think of God as the God of mathematical and physical laws and the underpinnings of the universe. Other people believe in a God who intervenes in our affairs, turns water into wine, answers prayers, and smites the wicked. The Koran implies that God lives outside of time, and, thus, our brains are not up to the task of understanding Him. Some theologians have suggested that only especially sensitive individuals can glimpse God, but us ordinary folk shouldn't deny His existence in the same way that a blind man shouldn't deny the existence of a rainbow. In modern times, many scientists ponder the amazing panoply of chemical and physical constants that control the expansion of the universe and seem tuned to permit the formation of stars and the synthesis of carbon-based life.

Questions about God's omniscience are particularly mind-numbing, yet we can still ask if it is rational to believe in an omniscient God. As Steven J. Brams points out in his book Superior Beings, "The rationality of theistic belief is separate from its truth — a belief need not be true or even verifiable to be rational." However, if we posit the existence of an omniscient God, His omniscience may require him to know the history of all quarks in the universe, the states of all electrons, the vibrations of every string, and the ripples of the quantum foam. Is this the same God, who in Exodus 21 gave Moses laws describing when one should stone an ox to death? Is the God of Gluons and Galaxies the same God concerned with Israeli oxen dung?

But what about the Bible itself? Today, the Bible — especially the Old Testament — may serve as an alternate reality device. It gives its readers a glimpse of other ways of thinking and of other worlds. It is also the most mysterious book ever written. We don't know the ratio of myth to history. We don't know all the authors. We are not always sure of the intended message. We don't fully understand the Old Testament's Nephilim or its Bridegroom of Blood. We only know that that the Bible reflects some of humankind's most ancient and deep feelings. For some unknown reason, it is a bell that has resonated through the centuries. It lets us reach across cultures, see visions, and better understand what we have held sacred. Because the Bible is a hammer that shatters the ice of our unconscious, it thus provides one of many mechanisms in our quest for transcendence.

Clifford A. Pickover is a researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center and author of The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience.

"How are behaviors encoded in DNA?"

Many animals have have quite substantial hereditary behavior. Moreover, these behaviors are subject to evolution on fairly short time scales, so they probably have straightforward DNA encodings on which mutations can act. Mostly the behaviors seem to be sequences of actions, but perhaps there are some of the form "do X until Y is true".

John McCarthy is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

"Why do we tell stories?"

Why a story?

Human beings can't help but understand their world in terms of narratives. Although the theory of evolution effectively dismantled our creationist myths over a century ago, most thinking humans still harbor an attachment to the notion that we were put here, with purpose, by something. New understandings of emergence, as well as new tools for perceiving the order underlying chaos, seem to the hold the promise for a widescale liberation from the constructed myths we use to organize our experience, as well as the dangers that over-dependence on such narratives bring forth. At least I hope so.

At the very least, narratives are less dangerous when we are free to participate in their writing. I'll venture that it is qualitatively better for human beings to take an active role in the unfolding of our collective story than it is to adhere blindly to the testament of our ancestors or authorities.

But what of moving out of the narrative altogether? Is it even possible? Is our predisposition for narrative physiological, psychological, or cultural?

Is it an outmoded form of cognition that yields only bloody clashes when competing myths are eventually mistaken for irreconcilable realities? Or are stories the only way we have of interpreting our world — meaning that the forging of a collective set of mutually tolerant narratives is the only route to a global civilization?

Douglas Rushkoff is a Professor of Media Culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommu-nications Program and author of Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say.

"Eureka: What makes coherence so important to us?"

When something is missing, it bothers us that things don't hang together. Consider: "Give him." In any language, that is a bothersome sentence. Something essential is missing, and it rings an alarm bell in our brains. We go in search of an implied "what" and try to guess what will make the words all hang together into a complete thought.

We ask questions in search of satisfying incompletes, again hoping to create some coherence. No other animal does such things. It even forms the basis of many of our recreations such as jigsaw and crossword puzzles, all those little eurekas along the way.

Guessing a hidden pattern fascinates us. It's part of our pleasure in complex ritual or listening to Bach, to be able to guess what comes next some of the time. It's boring when it is completely predictable, however; it's the search for how things all hang together that is so much fun. Of course, we make a lot of mistakes. Every other winter, I get fooled into thinking that a radio has been left on, somewhere in the house, and I go in search of it — only to realize that it was just the wind whistling around the house. My brain tried to make coherence out of chaos by trying out familiar word patterns on it.

Astrology, too, seems to make lots of things "all hang together." Often in science, we commit such initial errors but we are now fairly systematic about discovering and discarding them. We go on to find much better explanations for how things hang together. Finding coherence is one of our great pleasures. It would be nice to know what predisposes our brain to seek out hidden coherence.

For one thing, it might help illuminate the power of an idea — and with it, how fanaticism works.

Fundamentalist schemes that seem to make everything hang together can easily override civilization's prohibitions against murder. Inferring an enveloping coherence can create an "other" who is outside the bounds of "us." Because it seems so whole, so right, it may become okay to beat up on unbelievers — say, fans of an opposing football team, or of another religion.

For scientists and crossword fans, it's finding the coherence that is important. Then we move on. But many people, especially in the generation which follows its inventors, get trapped by a seemingly coherent worldview. Things get set in concrete; the coherent framework provides comfort, but it also creates dangerous us-and-them boundaries.

William Calvin is a theoretical neurobiologist at the University of Washington and author of How Brains Think.

"Is morality relative or absolute?"

Humans spread out from a common origin into many different global environments. It was a triumph of our unique adaptability, for we display the broadest range of behaviours — nutritional, social, sexual and reproductive – of any animal. We also have classes of behaviour — religious, scientific, artistic, gendered, and philosophical, each underpinned by special languages — that animals lack. Paradoxically, success also came through conformity. Prehistorians track archaeological cultures by recognizing the physical symbolic codes (art styles, burial rites, settlement layouts) that channelled local routines. Each culture constrained diversity and could punish it with ostracism and death. Isolation bred idiosyncracy, and there was a shock when we began regional reintegration. Early empires created state religions which, although sometimes refracting species-wide instincts for a common-good, tended to elevate chosen peoples and their traditional ways.

Now we can monitor all of our cultures there is a need to adjudicate on conduct at a global level. But my question is not understood in the same way by everyone. To fundamentalists, it is heretical, because morality is God-given. Social theorists, on the other hand, often interpret absolute morality as imperialist —no more than local ethics metastasized by (for example) the United Nations. But appeals to protect cultural diversity are typically advanced without regard to the reality of individual suffering in particular communities. A third position, shared by many atheistic scientists and traditional Marxists, is based on ideas of utility, happiness and material truth: what is right is understood as being what is good for the species. But no one agrees on what this is, or how competing claims for access to it should be settled.

The 'ethics of care', first developed within feminist philosophy, moves beyond these positions. Instead of connecting morals either to religious rules and principles or reductive natural laws, it values shared human capacities, such as intimacy, sympathy, trust, fidelity, and compassion. Such an ethics might elide the distinction between relative and absolute by promoting species-wide common sense. Before we judge the prospect of my question vanishing as either optimistic or naïve, we must scrutinize the alternatives carefully.

Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist at University of Bradford, UK, and author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture.

"How will the sciences of the mind constrain our theories and policies of education?"

In several recent meetings that I have attended, I have been overwhelmed by the rift between what the sciences of mind, brain and behavior have uncovered over the past decade, and both how and what science educators teach.

In many arenas, educators hold on to a now dated view of the child's cognitive development, failing to appreciate the innate biases that our species has been equipped with. These biases constrain not only what the child can learn, but when it might most profitably learn such things. Take, for instance, the acquisition of mathematical knowledge. Educators aim for the acquisition of precise computations. There is now, however, evidence for an innately available approximate number system, one that operates spontaneously without education.

One might imagine that if educators attempted to push this system first — teaching children that 40 is a better answer to 25 + 12 than is 60 — that it might well facilitate the acquisition of the more precise system later in development. Similar issues arise in attempting to teach children about physics and biology. At some level, then, there must be a way for those in the trenches to work together with those in the ivory tower to advance the process of learning, building on what we have discovered from the sciences of the mind. 

Marc D. Hauser is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor at Harvard University and author of Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink.

"What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?"

While education is on every politician's agenda as an item of serious importance, it is astonishing that the notion of what it means to be educated never seems to come up. Our society, which is undergoing massive transformations almost on a daily basis never seems to transform its notion of what it means to be educated. We all seem to agree that an educated mind certainly entails knowing literature and poetry, appreciating history and social issues, being able to deal with matters of economics, being versatile in more than one language, understanding scientific principles and the basics of mathematics.

What I was doing in my last sentence was detailing the high school curriculum set down in 1892 by a committee chaired by the President of Harvard that was mandated for anyone who might want to enter a university. The curriculum they decided upon has not changed at all since then. Our implicit notions of an educated mind are the same as they were in the nineteenth century. No need to teach anything new, no need to reconsider how a world where a university education was offered solely to the elite might be different from a world in which a university degree is commonplace.

For a few years, in the early 90's, I was on the Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most everyone else on the board were octogenarians — the foremost of these, since he seemed to have everyone's great respect, was Clifton Fadiman, a literary icon of the 40's. When I tried to explain to this board the technological changes that were about to come that would threaten the very existence of the Encyclopedia, there was a general belief that technology would not really matter much. There would always be a need for the encyclopedia and the job of the board would always be to determine what knowledge was the most important to have. Only Clifton Fadiman seemed to realize that my predictions about the internet might have some effect on the institution they guarded. He concluded sadly, saying: "I guess we will just have to accept the fact that minds less well educated than our own will soon be in charge."

Note that he didn't say "differently educated," but "less well educated." For some years the literati have held sway over the commonly accepted definition of education. No matter how important science and technology seem to industry or government or indeed to the daily life of the people, as a society we believe that those educated in literature and history and other humanities are in some way better informed, more knowing, and somehow more worthy of the descriptor "well educated."

Now if this were an issue confined to those who run the elite universities and prep schools or those whose bible is the New York Review of Books, this really wouldn't matter all that much to anybody. But this nineteenth century conception of the educated mind weighs heavily on our notions of how we educate our young. We are not educating our young to work or to live in the nineteenth century, or at least we ought not be doing so. Yet, when universities graduate thousands of English and history majors because it can only be because we imagine that such fields form the basis of the educated mind. When we choose to teach our high schoolers trigonometry instead of say basic medicine or business skills, it can only be because we think that trigonometry is somehow more important to an educated mind or that education is really not about preparation for the real world. When we focus on intellectual and scholarly issues in high school as opposed to more human issues like communications, or basic psychology, or child raising, we are continuing to rely upon out dated notions of the educated mind that come from elitist notions of who is to be educated.

While we argue that an educated mind can reason, but curiously there are no courses in our schools that teach reasoning. When we say that an educated mind can see more than one side of an argument we go against the school system which holds that there are right answers to be learned and that tests can reveal who knows them and who doesn't.

Now obviously telecommunications is more important than basic chemistry and HTML is more significant than French in today's world. These are choices that have to be made, but they never will be made until our fundamental conception of erudition changes or until we realize that the schools of today must try to educate the students who actually attend them as opposed to the students who attended them in 1892.

The 21st century conception of an educated mind is based upon old notions of erudition and scholarship not germane to this century. The curriculum of the school system bears no relation to the finished products we seek. We need to rethink what it means to be educated and begin to focus on a new conception of the very idea of education.

Roger Schank is Distinguished Career Professor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University and author of Virtual Learning: A Revolutionary Approach to Building a Highly Skilled Workforce.

"Do the benefits accruing to humankind (leaving aside questions of afterlife) from the belief and practice of organized religions outweigh the costs?"

Given the political sensitivities of the topic, it is hard to imagine that a suitably rigorous attempt to answer this question could be organized or its results published and discussed soberly, but it is striking that there is no serious basis on which to conduct such a conversation. Religion brings peace and solace to many; religion kills people, divides societies, diverts energy and resources. How to assess the net impact in some meaningfully quantitative way? Even to imagine the possibility of such an inquiry and to think through some of the categories you would use could be very enlightening.

James J. O'Donnell is Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost at UPenn and author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.

"Is technology going to 'wake up' or 'come alive' anytime in the future?"

Bill Joy, the prominent computer scientist, argued in a Wired article last year that "the future doesn't need us" because other creatures, artificial or just post-human, are going to take over the world in the 21st century. He is worried that various technologies — particularly robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — are soon going to be capable of generating either a self-conscious machine (something like the Internet "waking up") or one capable of self-replication (nanotechnologists inspired by the vision of Eric Drexler are currently attempting to create a nano-scaled "universal assembler"). If either of these events came to pass, it would surely introduce major changes in the planetary ecology, and humans would have to find a new role to play in such a world. But is Joy right? Do we have to worry about mad scientists producing some invention that inadvertently renders us second-class citizens to machines in the next couple of decades? (Joy is so distraught by this prospect he would have everyone stop working in these areas.)

This is a difficult question to answer, mostly because we don't currently have a very good idea about how technology evolves, so it's hard to predict future developments. But I believe that we can get some way toward an answer by adopting an approach currently being developed by some of our best evolutionary thinkers, such as John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmary, and others. This "major transition" theory is concerned with determining the conditions under which new kinds of agents emerge in some evolutionary lineage. Examples of such transitions occurred when prokaryotes became eukaryotes, or single-celled organisms became multi cellular. In each case, previously independent biological agents evolved new methods of cooperation, with the result that a new level of organization and agency appeared in the world. This theory hasn't yet been applied to the evolution of technology, but could help to pinpoint important issues. In effect, what I want to investigate is whether the futures that disturb Bill Joy can be appropriately analyzed as major transitions in the evolution of technology. Given current trends in science and technology, can we say that a global brain is around the corner, or that nano-robots are going to conquer the Earth? That, at least, is my current project.

Robert Aunger is an evolutionary theorist and editor of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science.

"Was there any choice in the creation of the Universe?"

Here I paraphrase Einstein's famous question: "Did God have any choice in the creation of the Universe". I get rid of the God part, which Einstein only added to make it seem more whimsical, I am sure, because that just confuses the issue. The important question, perhaps the most important question facing physics today is the question of whether there is only one consistent set of physical laws that allow a working universe, or rather whether the constants of nature are arbitrary, and could take any set of values. Namely, if we continue to probe into the structure of matter and the nature of elementary forces will we find that mathematical consistency is possible only for one unique theory of the Universe, or not? In the former case, of course, there is hope for an exactly predictive "theory of everything". In the latter case, we might expect that it is natural that our Universe is merely one of an infinite set of Universes within some grand multiverse, in each of which the laws of physics differ, and in which anthropic arguments may govern why we live in the Universe we do.

The goal of physics throughout the ages has been to explain exactly why the universe is the way it is, but as we push closer and closer to the ultimate frontier, we may find out that in fact the ultimate laws of nature may generically produce a universe that is quite different from the one we live in. This would force a dramatic shift in our concept of natural law.

Some may suggest that this question is mere philosophical nonsense, and is akin to asking how many angels may sit on the head of a pin. However, I think that if we are lucky it may be empirically possible to address it. If, for example, we do come up with some fundamental theory that predicts the values of many fundamental quantities correctly, but that predicts that other mysterious quantities, like the energy of empty space, is generically different than the value we measure, or perhaps is determined probabilistically, this will add strong ammunition to the notion that our universe is not unique, but arose from an ensemble of causally disconnected parts, each with randomly varying values of the vacuum energy.

In any case, answerable or not, I think this is the ultimate question in science.

Lawrence Krauss is Professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Atom.

"How much can we handle?"

We've got fundamental scientific theories (such as quantum theory and relativity) that test out superbly, even if we don't quite know how they all fit into a whole, but we're hung up trying to understand complicated phenomena, like living things. How much complexity can we handle?

We ought to be able to use computers to model complicated things, but we can't as yet write software that's complicated enough to take advantage of the ever-bigger computers we are learning to build.

Complexity, side effects, legacy. How much can we handle? That's the question of the new century.

There's a social variant of the same problem:

In the twentieth century we become powerful enough to destroy ourselves, but we seemed to be able to handle that. Now technology and information flow have improved to the point that a small number of us might be able to destroy us all. Can we handle that?

Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and musician, is currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative.

"Why am I me?"

This question was asked by my eight-year-old grandson George. In eight letters it summarizes the conundrum of personal existence in an impersonal universe. How does it happen that a couple of liters of grey matter organizes itself into the unique stream of self-awareness that calls itself George? If we could answer this question, we would be on the way toward an understanding of brain structure and function at a deep level. We would probably have in our hands the key to a more rational and discriminating treatment of mental illnesses. We might also have the key to the design of a genuine artificial intelligence.

Every human being must have asked this question in one way or another. For most of us, the question expresses only a general philosophical curiosity about our place in the order of nature. But for George the question has a more specific technical meaning. He has an identical twin brother Donald, and he understands the distinction between monozygotic and fraternal twins. He knows that he and Donald not only have the same genes but also have the same environment and upbringing. When George asks the question, he is asking how it happens that two people with identical genes and identical nurture are nevertheless different. What are the non-genetic and non-environmental processes in the brain that cause George to be George and cause Donald to be Donald? If we could answer this question, we would have a powerful new tool for the investigation of cognitive development. The conventional wisdom says that mental differences between George and Donald arise from local randomness of neural connections, undetermined either by genes or by sensory input. But to say that the connections are random only means that we do not yet understand how they came about.

Freeman Dyson is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study and author of The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet.

"Do we want to live in one world, or two?"

One of the great achievements of recent history has been a dramatic reduction in absolute poverty in the world. In 1820 about 85% of the world's population lived on the equivalent of a dollar a day (converted to today's purchasing power). By 1980, that percentage had dropped to 30%, but it is now down to 20%.

But that still means 1 billion people live in absolute poverty. A further 2 billion are little better off, living on $2 a day. A quarter of the world's people never get a cup of clean water.

Part of what globalisation means is that we have a reasonable chance of assuring that a majority of the world's people will benefit from continuing economic growth, improvements in health and education, and the untapped potential of the extraordinary technologies about which most of the Edge contributors write so eloquently.

We currently lack the political will to make sure that a vast number of people are not fenced off from this optimistic future. So my question poses a simple choice. Are we content to have two, increasingly estranged world? Or do we want to find the path to a unified, healthy world?

Lance Knobel is Adviser, Prime Minister's Forward Strategy Unit, London, and the former head of the program of the World Economic Forums' Annual meeting in Davos.

"What's the neurobiology of doing good and being good?"

I've spent most of my career as a neurobiologist working on an area of the brain called the hippocampus. It's a fairly useful region — it plays a critical role in learning and memory. It's the area that's damaged in Alzheimer's, in alcoholic dementia, during prolonged seizures or cardiac arrest. You want to have your hippocampus functioning properly. So I've spent all these years trying to figure out why hippocampal neurons die so easily and what you can do about it. That's fine, might even prove useful some day. But as of late, it's been striking me that I'm going to be moving in the direction of studying a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

It's a fascinating part of the brain, the part of the brain that most defines us as humans. There's endless technical ways to describe what the PFC does, but as an informal definition that works pretty well, it's the closest thing we have to a superego. The PFC is what allows us to become potty trained early on. And it is responsible for squeezing our psychic sphincters closed as well. It keeps us from belching loudly at the quiet moment in the wedding ceremony, prevents us from telling our host just what we really think of the inedible meal they've served. It keeps us from having our murderous thoughts turn into murderous acts. And it plays a similar role in the cognitive realm — the PFC stops us from falling into solving a problem with an answer that, while the easier, more reflexive one, is wrong. The PFC is what makes us do the right thing, even if it's harder.

Not surprisingly, it's one of the last parts of the brain to fully develop (technical jargon — to fully myelinate). But what is surprising is just how long it is before the PFC comes fully on line — astonishingly, around age 30. And this is where my question comes in. It is best framed in the context of young kids, and this is probably what has prompted me to begin to think about the PFC, as I have two young children. Kids are wildly "frontally disinhibited," the term for having a PFC that hasn't quite matured yet into keeping its foot firmly on the brake. Play hide and seek with a three year old, loudly, plaintively call, "Where are you," and their lack of frontal function does them in — they can't stop themselves from calling out — Here I am, under the table — giving away their hiding spot. I suspect that there is a direct, near linear correlation between the number of fully myelinated frontal neurons in a small child's brain and how many dominoes you can line up in front of him before he must MUST knock them over.

So my question comes to the forefront in a scenario that came up frequently for me a few years ago: my then three year old who, while a wonderful child, was distinctly three, would do something reasonably appalling to his younger sister — take some stuffed animal away, grab some contested food item, whatever. A meltdown then ensues. My wife or I intervene, strongly reprimanding our son for mistreating his sister. And then the other parent would say, "Well, is this really fair to be coming down on him like this?, after all, he has no frontal function yet, he can't stop himself" (my wife is a neuropsychologist so, pathetically, we actually speak this way to each other). And the other would retort — "Well, how else is he going to develop that frontal function?"

That's the basic question — how does the world of empathy, theory of mind, gratification postponement, Kohlberg stages of moral development, etc., combine with the world of neurotrophic growth factors stimulating neurons to grow fancier connections? How do they produce a PFC that makes you do the harder thing because it's right? How does this become a life-long pattern of PFC function

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and author of A Primate's Memoir.

"Is humanity in the midst of a cognitive 'Fourth-Transition?' Or, why doesn't the Encyclopedia Brittanica matter any more?"

It feels to me like something very important is going on. Clearly our children aren't quite like us. They don't learn about the world as we did. They don't storehouse knowledge about the world as we have. They don't "sense" the world as we do. Could humanity possibly already be in the middle of a next stage of cognitive transition?

Merlin Donald has done a fine job of summarizing hundreds of inquiries into the evolution of culture and cognition in his Origins of the Modern Mind. Here, as in his other work, he posits a series of "layered" morphological, neurological and external technological stages in this evolutionary path. What he refers to as the "Third Transition" (from "Mythic" to "Theoretic" culture), appears to have begun 2500 (or so) years ago and has now largely completed its march to "mental" dominance worldwide.

While this last "transition" did not require biological adaptation (or speciation), it nonetheless changed us — neurologically and psycho-culturally. The shift from the "primary orality" of "Mythic culture" to the literacy and the reliance of what Donald calls an "External Symbolic Storage" network, has resulted in a new sort of mind. The "modern" mind.

Could we be "evolving" towards an even newer sort of mind as a result of our increasing dependence on newer sorts of symbolic networks and newer environments of technologies?

Literacy (while still taught and used) doesn't have anywhere near the clout it once had. Indeed, as fanatical "literalism" (aka "fundamentalism") thrashes its way to any early grave (along with the decline of the reciprocal fascination of the past 50 years to "deconstruct" everything as "texts"), how much will humanity care about and rely upon the encyclopedic storage of knowledge in alphabetic warehouses?

Perhaps we are already "learning," "knowing" and "sensing" the world in ways that presage something very different from the "modern" mind. Should we ask the children?

Mark Stahlman, a venture capitalist who has been focused on next generation computer/networking platforms, is co-founder the Newmedia Laboratory, NYNMA.

"What are minds, that they are both essentially mental yet inextricably intertwined with body (and world)?"

We thought we had this one nailed. Believing (rightly) that the physical world is all there is, the sciences of the mind re-invented thought and reason (and feeling) as information-processing events in the human brain. But this vision turns out to be either incomplete or fatally flawed. The neat and tidy division between a level of information processing (software) and of physicality (implementation) is useful when we deal with humanly engineered systems. We build such systems, as far as possible, to keep the levels apart. But nature was not guided by any such neat and tidy design principles. The ways that evolved creatures solve problems of anticipation, response, reasoning and perceiving seem to involve endless leakage and interweaving between motion, action, visceral (gut) response, and somewhat more detached contemplation. When we solve a jigsaw puzzle, we look, think, and categorise: but we also view the scene and pieces from new angles, moving head and body. And we pick pieces up and try them out. Real on-the-hoof human reason is like that through and through. Even the use of pen and paper to construct arguments displays the same complex interweaving of embodied action, perceptual re-encountering, and neural activity. Mind and body (and world) emerge as messily and continuously coupled partners in the construction of rational action.

But this leads to a very real problem, an impasse that is currently the single greatest roadblock in the attempts to construct a mature science of the mind. We cannot, despite the deep and crucial roles of body and world, understand the mind in quite the same terms as, say, an internal combustion engine. Where minds are concerned, it is the flow of contents (and feelings) that seems to matter. Yet if we prescind from the body and world, pitching our stories and models at the level of the information flows, we again lose sight of the distinctively human mind. We need the information-and-content based story to see the mind as, precisely, a mind. Yet we cannot do justice to minds like ours without including body, world (cognitive tools and other people) and motion in roles which are both genuinely cognitive yet thoroughly physical.

What we lack is a framework, picture, or model in terms of which to understand this larger system as the cognitive engine. All current stories are forced to one side (information flows) or the other (physical dynamics). Cognitive Science thus stands in a position similar to that of Physics in the early decades of the 20th century. What we lack is a kind of 'quantum theory' of the mind: a new framework that displays mind as mind, yet as body in action too.

Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, UK and the author of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.

"At what age should women say, 'No,' to first-time pregnancy?"

Scientific advances now make it possible for a woman past normal child-bearing years to bear a child. Some of my high-tech friends who range from age 43 to almost 50 are either bearing children or plan to using in-vitro techniques. These women have postponed childbearing because of their careers, but they want to experience the joys of family that their male counterparts were able to share while still pursuing their professional goals — an option far more difficult for the childbearer and primary care provider.

Many successful men start first, second, or third families later in their lives, so why should we criticize women who want to bear a first child, when, thanks to science, it is no longer "too late?"

Sylvia Paull is the founder of Gracenet (www.gracenet.net).

"What is the relationship between being alive and having a mind?"

Last year, Steven Spielberg directed a film, based upon a Stanley Kubrick project, entitled "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". The film depicts a robotic child who develops human emotions. Is such a thing possible? Could a sufficiently complex and appropriately designed computer embody human emotions? Or is this simply a fanciful notion that the public and some scientists who specialize in artificial intelligence just wish could be true?

I don’t think that computers will ever become conscious and I view Spielberg’s depiction of a conscious feeling robot a good example of what might be called the "The Spielberg Principle" that states: When a Steven Spielberg film depicts a world-changing scientific event, the likelihood of that event actually occurring approaches zero." In other words, our wishes and imagination often have little to do with what is scientifically likely or possible. For example, although we might wish for contact with other beings in the universe as portrayed in the Spielberg movie "E.T", the astronomical distances between our solar system and the rest of the universe makes an E.T.-like visit extremely unlikely.

The film A.I. and the idea contained within it that robots could someday become conscious is another case in which our wishes exceed reality. Despite enormous advances in artificial intelligence, no computer is able to experience a pin prick like a simple frog, or get hungry like a rat, or become happy or sad like all of us carbon-based units. But why is this the case? It is my conjecture that this is because there are some features of being alive that makes mind, consciousness, and feelings possible. That is, only living things are capable of the markers of mind such as intentionality, subjectivity, and self-awareness. But the important question of the link between life and the creation of consciousness remains a great scientific mystery, and the answer will go a long way toward our understanding of what a mind actually is.

Todd E. Feinberg, MD is Chief, Yarmon Neurobehavior and Alzheimer's Disease Center, Beth Israel Medical Center

"To be or not to be?"

Old questions don't go away (at least while they remain unanswered). Suppose Edge were to have asked Hamlet for his Y 2002 question We can guess the answer. "Sorry, John, I know it's a bit of a cliché, but it's the same question it has always been." Suppose Edge turned next to Albert Camus. "John, I said it in 1942 and I'm still waiting. 'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.'"

Clichés they may be.  But I'd say there's every reason for students of human nature to continue to treat these questions with due seriousness: and in particular to think further about who has been asking them,  when, and why, and with what consequences.  It may seem a paradox that human beings should have evolved to have a love-hate relationship with their own existence. But in fact there may be a simple Darwinian story to be told about how it has come to be  so.

Let's accept the stark truth that individual human beings have been designed by natural selection to be, in Dawkins' famous phrase, "survival machines" whose primary function is to help the genes they carry to make it into future generations. We should admit, then, that, from this evolutionary viewpoint, an  individual human life cannot be considered an end in itself but only a means to promoting the success of genes.

Yet the fact is that in the human case (and maybe the human case alone) natural selection has devised a peculiarly effective trick  for persuading individual survival machines to fulfill this seemingly bleak role. Every human being is endowed  with the mental programs for developing a "conscious self" or "soul": a soul which not only  values its own survival but  sees itself as very much an end in its own right  (in fact a soul which, in a fit of solipsism,  may even consider itself the one and only source of all the ends there are!). Such  a soul, besides doing all it can to ensure its own basic comfort and security, will typically strive for self-development: through learning, creativity, spiritual growth, symbolic expression,  consciousness-raising, and so on. These activities redound to the advantage of mind and body. The result is that such "selfish souls" do indeed make wonderful agents for "selfish genes".

There has, however,  always been a catch.  Naturally-designed "survival machines" are not, as the name might imply machines designed to go on and on surviving: instead they are machines designed to survive only up to a point —  this  being the point where the genes they carry have nothing more to gain (or even things to lose) from continued life.  For it"s a sobering fact that genes are generally  better off taking passage and propagating themselves in younger machines than older ones (the older ones will have begun to accumulate defects, to have become set in their ways, to have acquired more than enough dependents, etc.) It suits  genes therefore that their survival machines should have a limited life-time, after which they can be scrapped. 

Thus,  in a scenario that has all the makings of tragedy (if not a tragic farce),  natural selection has, on the one hand,  been shaping up individual human beings at the level of their souls to believe in themselves and their intrinsic worth, while on the other hand taking steps to ensure that these same individuals on the level of their bodies grow old and die —  and, most likely, since by this stage of a life the genes no longer have any interest in preventing it,  to die miserably, painfully and in a state of dreadful disillusion.

However,  here's the second catch. In order for this double-game that the genes are playing to be successful, it's essential that the soul they've designed does not see what's coming and realise the extent to which it has been duped, at least until too late. But this means preventing the soul, or at any rate cunningly diverting it,  from following some of the very lines of inquiry on which it has been set up  to place its hopes: looking to the future, searching for eternal truths, and so on. In Camus' words "Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined".

The history of human psychology and culture has revolved around this contradiction built into human nature. Science has not had much to say about it. But it may yet.

Nicholas Humhprey is a theoretical psychologist at the London School of Economics, and author of Leaps of Faith.

"Why Sleep?"

We need to sleep every day. Why do we spend a third of our lives in a dormant state? Sleep deprivation leads to loss of judgment, failure of health, and eventually to death. The cycle of sleep and alertness is controlled by circadian rhythms, which also affect body temperature, digestion and other regulatory systems. Despite the importance of sleep its purpose is a mystery.

The brain remains highly active during sleep, so the simple explanation that we sleep in order to rest cannot be the whole story. Activity in the sleeping brain is largely hidden from us because very little that occurs during sleep directly enters consciousness. However, electrical recordings and more recently brain imaging experiments during slow-wave sleep have revealed highly ordered patterns of activity that are much more spatially and temporally coherent than brain activity during states of alertness. Slow-wave sleep alternates during the night with rapid eye sleep movement (REM) sleep, during which dreams occur and muscles are paralyzed. For the last 10 years my colleagues and I have been building computer models of interacting neurons that can account for rhythmic brain activity during sleep.

Computer models of the sleeping brain and recent experimental evidence point toward slow-wave sleep as a time during which brain cells undergo extensive structural reorganization. It takes many hours for the information acquired during the day to be integrated into long-term memory through biochemical reactions. Could it be that we go to sleep every night in order to remember better and think more clearly?

Introspection is misleading in trying to understand the brain in part because much of the processing that takes place to support seeing, hearing and decision-making is subconscious. In studying the brain during sleep when we are aware of almost nothing, we may get a better understanding of the brain’s secret life and uncover some of the elusive principles that makes the mind so illusive.

Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist and Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, is a coauthor of Thalamocortical Assemblies: How Ion Channels, Single Neurons and Large-Scale Networks Organize Sleep Oscillations.

"What makes a genius, and how can we have more of them?"

As any software developer will tell you, one great programmer is easily worth ten average ones. The great strides in knowledge have most often come from those we label "genius." Newton, Gauss, Einstein, Feyneman, de Morgan, Crick all seemed to be able to make connections or see patterns that others had ignored. They often visualized the world differently, or with fewer constraints than most of us have on our imagination. There are many great problems of science and society to be solved, and applying genius to them could help speed the solutions.

Perhaps the analysis of Einstein's brain done by Professor Diamond at Berkeley, which seems to show differences in structure in the inferior parietal region, and a higher proportion of glial cells can lead to some physiological answers. Perhaps there are chemical enhancers which can be used (legally, one would hope), to increase oxygen flow to neurons. Perhaps behavioral conditioning when we're young can help create more of the right type of structures, just as musicians who being training in early childhood have larger portions of the brain devoted to their skills.

Whatever the answer, mankind might be better for some more genius directed at the environmental, social and scientific fields.

Howard Morgan is Vice-Chairman, Idealab.

"Why do people — even identical twins — differ from one another in personality?"

This question needs to be asked because of the widely held conviction that we already know the answer to it. We don't. Okay, we know half of the answer: one of the reasons why people differ from each other is that they have different genes. That's the easy half.

The hard half is the part that isn't genetic. Even people who have identical genes, like Freeman Dyson's twin grandsons (see his question), differ in personality. I am not asking about the feeling each twin has of being "me": George and Donald could be identical in personality, and yet each could have a sense of me-ness.

But if George and Donald are like most identical twins, they aren't identical in personality. Identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins or ordinary siblings, but less alike than you would expect. One might be more meticulous than the other, or more outgoing, or more emotional. The weird thing is that the degree of similarity is the same, whether twins are reared together or apart. George and Donald, according to their grandfather, "not only have the same genes but also have the same environment and upbringing." And yet they are no more alike in personality than twins reared by two different sets of parents in two different homes.

We know that something other than genes is responsible for some of the variation in human personality, but we are amazingly ignorant about what it is and how it works. Well-designed research has repeatedly failed to confirm commonly held beliefs about which aspects of a child's environment are important. The evidence indicates that neither those aspects of the environment that siblings have in common (such as the presence or absence of a caring father) nor those that supposedly widen the differences between siblings (such as parental favoritism or competition between siblings) can be responsible for the non-genetic variation in personality. Nor can the vague idea of an "interaction" between genes and environment save the day. George and Donald have the same genes, so how can an interaction between genes and environment explain their differences?

Only two hypotheses are compatible with the existing data. One, which I proposed in my book The Nurture Assumption, is that the crucial experiences that shape personality are those that children have outside their home. Unfortunately, there is as yet insufficient evidence to support (or disconfirm) this hypothesis.

The remaining possibility is that the unexplained variation in personality is random. Even for reared-together twins, there are minor, random differences in their experiences. I find it
implausible, however, that minor, random differences in experiences could be so potent, given the ineffectiveness of substantial, systematic differences. If randomness affects personality, the way it probably works is through biological means — not genetic but biological. The human genome is smallish and the human brain is vast; the genome couldn't possibly contain precise specifications for every neuron and synapse. Identical twins don't have identical brains for the same reason that they don't have identical freckles or fingerprints.

If these random physical differences in the brain are responsible for some or all of the personality differences between identical twins, they must also be responsible for some or all of the non-genetic variation in personality among the rest of us. "All" is highly unlikely; "some" is almost certainly true. What remains in doubt is not whether, but how much.

The bottom line is that scientists will probably never be able to predict human behavior with anything close to certainty. Next question: Is this discouraging news or cause for celebration?

Judith Rich Harris is a developmental psychologist and author of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do.

"Many Universes?"

Preliminaries

We do not know whether there are other universes. Perhaps we never shall. But I want to respond to Paul Davies' questions by arguing that "do other universes exist?" can be a genuine scientific question. Moreover, I shall outline why it is an interesting question; and why, indeed, I already suspect that the answer may be "yes".

First, a pre-emptive and trivial comment: if you define the universe as "everything there is", then by definition there cannot be others. I shall, however, follow the convention among physicists and astronomers, and define the "universe" as the domain of space-time that encompasses everything that astronomers can observe. Other "universes", if they existed, could differ from ours in size, content, dimensionality, or even in the physical laws governing them.

It would be neater, if other "universes" existed, to redefine the whole enlarged ensemble as "the universe", and then introduce some new term — for instance "the metagalaxy" — for the domain that cosmologists and astronomers have access to. But so long as these concepts remain so conjectural, it is best to leave the term "universe" undisturbed, with its traditional connotations, even though this then demands a new word, the "multiverse", for a (still hypothetical) ensemble of "universes."

Ontological Status Of Other Universes

Science is an experimental or observational enterprise, and it's natural to be troubled by assertions that invoke something inherently unobservable. Some might regard the other universes as being in the province of metaphysics rather than physics. But I think they already lie within the proper purview of science. It is not absurd or meaningless to ask "Do unobservable universes exist?", even though no quick answer is likely to be forthcoming. The question plainly