JOHN R. SKOYLES
Neuroscience researcher; Coauthor, Up From Dragons

Here's what I believe but cannot prove: human beings, like all animals, have evolved a range of capacities for fighting disease and recovering from injury, including a variety of 'sickness behaviors'; humans beings alone however have discovered the advantages of off-loading much of the responsibility for managing their sickness behaviors to other people; the result is that for human beings the very nature of illness has changed—human illness is now largely a social phenomenon.

This is possible because "illness" is a response. A rise in body temperature, for example, kills many bacteria and changes the membrane properties of cells so viruses cannot replicate. The pain of a broken bone or weak heart makes sure we let it heal or rest. Nature supplied our bodies in this way with a first-aid kit but unfortunately like many medicines their "treatments" are unpleasant. That unpleasantness, not the dysfunction which they seek to remedy is what we call "illness".

These remedies, however, have costs as well as benefits making it often difficult for the body to know whether to deploy them. A fever might fight an infection but if the body lacks sufficient energy stores, the fever might kill. The body therefore must make a decision whether the gain of clearing the infection merits the risk. Complicating that decision is that the body is blind, for example, to whether it faces a mild or a life-threatening virus. The body thus deploys its treatments in a precautionary manner. If only one in ten fevers actually clears an infection that would kill, it makes sense to tolerate the cost of the other nine. Most of the body's capacities for fighting disease and repairing injury are deployed in this precautionary way. We feel pain in a broken limb so we treat it over protectively—in nine occasions out of ten we could get by with less protective pain but on the tenth it stops us causing it further injury. But precautionary deployment is costly. Evolution therefore has put the evaluation of such deployment under the control of the brain in attempt to keep their use to a minimum.

But the brain on its own often lacks the experience to know our own condition. Fortunately, other people can, particularly those that have studied health and illness.

Human evolution therefore changed illness by offloading decisions about deployment whenever possible on to professionals. People that make themselves experienced in disease and injury, after all, have the background knowledge to know our bodies much better than ourselves. Healing professionals—healers, shamans, witch doctors and medics—exist in all human cultures. Of course, such professionals were seen by their patients as offering real treatments—and a few did help such as advising rest, eating well and some medicinal herbs. But most of what they did was ineffective. Doctors indeed had to wait until 1908 and Paul Ehrlich's discovery of Salvarsan for treating syphilis before they had a really effective treatment for a major disease. Nonetheless earlier doctors and healers were considered by themselves and their patients to be in the possession of very powerful cures.

Why? The answer I believe was that their ineffective rituals and potions actually worked. Evolution prepared us to offload control of our abilities to fight disease and heal injuries to those that knew more than us. The rituals and quackery of healers might have not worked but they certainly made a patient feel they were in the hands of an expert. That gave a healer great power over their patient. As noted, many of the body's own "treatments" are used on a precautionary basis so they can be stopped without harm. A healer could do this by applying an impressive "cure" that persuaded the body that its own "treatments" were no longer needed. The body would trust its healer and halt its own efforts and so the "illness". The patient as a result would feel much better, if not cured. Human evolution therefore made doctoring more than just a science and a question of prescribing the right treatment. It made it also an art by which a doctor persuades the patient's body to offload its decision making onto them.

THOMAS METZINGER
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Author, Being No One

I believe, but cannot prove, that a First Breakthrough on Consciousness is actually around the corner. "Actually around the corner" means: less than 50 years away. My intuition is that, roughly, all we need for this first breakthrough are four convincing stories.

The first story will be about global integration, about the dynamical self-organization of long-range binding operations in the human brain. It will probably involve something like synchrony in multiple frequency bands, and will let us understand how a unified model of the world can emerge in our own heads.

The second story will be about "transparency": Why is it that we are unable to consciously experience most of the images our brain generates as images? The answer to this question will give us a real world. The transparency-tale has to do with not being able to see earlier processing stages and becoming a naive realist.

The third story will focus on the Now, the emergence of a psychological moment—on a deeper understanding of what William James' called the "specious present". Experts on short term memory and neural network modelers with tell this story for us. As it unfolds, it will explain the emergence of a subjective present and let us understand how conscious experience, in its simplest and most essential form, is the presence of a world.

Interestingly, today almost everybody in the consciousness community already agrees on some version of the fourth story: Consciousness is directly linked to attentional processing, more precisely, to a hidden mechanism constantly holding information available for attention. The subjective presence of a world is a clever strategy of making integrated information available for attention.

I believe, but cannot prove, that this will allow us to find the global neural correlate for consciousness. However, being a philosopher, I want much more than that—I am also interested in precise concepts. What I will be waiting for is the young mathematician who then comes along and suddenly allows us to see how all of these four stories were actually only one: The genius who gives us a formal model describing the information flow in this neural correlate, and in just the right way. She will harvest the fruits of generations or researchers before her, and this will be the First Breakthrough on Consciousness.

Then three things will happen.

1. The Second Breakthrough on Consciousness will take much longer. Things will get messy and complicated. The philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness will get bogged down in diabolic details and ugly technical problems. Public attention will soon shift away from the problem of consciousness per se. Instead, new generations of young researchers will now focus on the nature of self and social cognition.

2. The overall development will have an unexpectedly strong cultural impact. People will not want to face their own mortality. There will be fundamentalist and anti-rational counter movements against the scientific image of man. At the same time crude new ideologies propagating vulgar forms of materialism and primitive forms of hedonism will spring up. Scientists will realize that one can not reductively explain the human mind and then simply look another way, leaving the consequences for someone else to deal with.

3. We will be able to influence consciousness in ways we have never dreamt of. There will be a new form of technology—Consciousness Technology—exclusively focusing on how to manipulate the neural correlate of consciousness in ever more fine-grained, efficient, and risk-free ways. People will realize that we need some sort of applied ethics for this new type of technology. And hopefully we will all together start to tell a new story—a story about how to live with these brains and about what a good state of consciousness actually is.

JEAN PAUL SCHMETZ
Economist; Managing Director of CyberLab Interactive Productions GmbH (Burda Media Group).

When considering this question one has to remember the basis of the scientific method: formulating hypotheses that can be disproved. Those hypotheses that are not disproved are thought to be true until disproved. Since it is more glamorous for a scientist to formulate hypotheses that it is to spend years disproving existing ones from other scientists and that it is unlikely that someone will spend enough time and energy trying to disprove his/her own statements, our body of scientific knowledge is surely full of statements we believe to be true but will eventually be proved to be false.

So I turn the question around: What scientific ideas that have not been disproved, do you believe are false.

In my field (theoretical economics), I believe that most ideas taught in economics 101 will be proved false eventually. Most of them would already have been officially defined as false in any other more hard-science, but, because of lack of better hypotheses they are still widely accepted and used in economics and general commentary. Eventually, someone will come up with another type of hypotheses explaining (and predicting) the economic reality in a way that will render most existing economics beliefs false.

ALEX (SANDY) PENTLAND
Computer Scientist, MIT Media Laboratory

Tribal Mind.

What would it be like to be part of a distributed intelligence but still with an individual consciousness? Well for starters, you might expect to see the collective mind 'take over' from time to time, directly guiding the individual minds. In humans, the behavior of angry mobs and frightened crowds seem to qualify as examples of a 'collective mind' in action, with non-linguistic channels of communication usurping the individual capacity for rational behavior.

But as powerful as this sort of group compulsion can be, it is usually regarded as simply a failure of individual rationality, a primitive behavioral safety net for the tribe in times of great stress. Surely this tribal mind doesn't operate in normal day-to-day behavior—or does it? If we imagined that human behavior was in substantial part due to a collective tribal mind, you would expect that non-linguistic social signaling—the type that drives mob behavior—would be predictive of even the most rational and important human interactions. Analogous with the wiggle dance of the honeybee, there ought to be non-linguistic signals that accurately predict important behavioral outcomes.

And that is exactly what I find. Together with my research group I have built a computer system that objectively measures a set of non-linguistic social signals, such as engagement, mirroring, activity, and stress, by looking at 'tone of voice' over one minute time periods. Although people are largely unconscious of this type of behavior, other researchers (Jaffe, Chartrand and Bargh, France, Kagen) have shown that similar measurements are predictive of infant language development, judgments of empathy, depression, and even personality development in children. Working with colleagues, we have found that we can use these measurements of social signaling to automatically predict a wide range of important behavioral outcomes—objective, instrumental, and subjective—with high accuracy, accounting for between 30% and 80% of the total outcome variance.

Examples of objective and instrumental behaviors where we can accurately predict the outcome include salary negotiations, dating decisions, and role in the social network. Examples of subjective predictions include hiring preferences, empathy perceptions, and interest ratings. Even for lengthy interactions, accurate predictions can be made by observing only the initial few minutes of interaction, even though the linguistic content of these 'thin slices' of the behavior seem to have little predictive power.

I find all of this astounding. We are examining some of the most important interactions a human has: finding a mate, getting a job, negotiating a salary, finding your place in your social network. These are activities for which we prepare intellectually and strategically for decades. And yet the largely unconscious social signaling that occurs at the start of the interaction appears to be more predictive than either the contextual facts (is he attractive? is she experienced?) or the linguistic structure (e.g., strategy chosen, arguments employed, etc.).

So what is going on here? One might speculate that the social signaling we are measuring evolved as a method of establishing tribal hierarchy and cohesion, analogous to Dunbar's view that language evolved as grooming behavior. On this view the tribal mind would function as unconscious collective discussion about relationships and resources, risks and rewards, and would interact with the conscious individual minds by filtering ideas by their value relative to the tribe. Our measurements tap into the discussion, and predict outcome by use of social regularities. For instance, in a salary negotiation it is important for the lower-status individual to establish that they are 'team player' by being empathetic, while in a potential dating situation the key variable is the female's level of interest. In our data there seem to be patterns of signaling that reliably lead to these desired states.

One question to ask about this social signaling is whether or not it is an independent channel of communication, e.g., is it causal or do the signals arise from the linguistic structure? We don't have the full answer to that yet, but we do know that similar measurements predict infant language and personality development, that adults can change their signaling by adopting different roles or identities within a conversation, and in our studies the linguistic and factual content seems uncorrelated with the pattern or intensity of social signaling. So even if social signaling turns out to be only an adjunct to normal linguistic structure, it is a very interesting addition: it is a little like having speech annotated with speaker intent!

So here is what I suspect but can not prove: a very large proportion of our behavior is determined by largely unconscious social signaling, which sets the context, risk, and reward structure within which traditional cognitive processes proceed. This conjecture resonates with Pinker's view about brain complexity, and with Kosslyn's thoughts about social prosthetic systems. It is also provides a concrete mechanism for the well-known processes of group polarization ('the risky shift'), groupthink, and the sometimes irrational behaviors of larger groups. In short, it may be useful to starting thinking of humans as having a collective, tribal mind in addition to their personal mind.

RAY KURZWEIL
Inventor and Technologist; Author, The Age of Spiritual Machines

We will find ways to circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information.

We are expanding our computers and communication systems both inwardly and outwardly. Our chips use every smaller feature sizes, while at the same time we deploy greater amounts of matter and energy for computation and communication (for example, we're making a larger number of chips each year). In one to two decades, we will progress from two-dimensional chips to three-dimensional self-organizing circuits built out of molecules. Ultimately, we will approach the limits of matter and energy to support computation and communication.

As we approach an asymptote in our ability to expand inwardly (that is, using finer features), computation will continue to expand outwardly, using readily available materials on Earth such as carbon. But we will eventually reach the limits of the resources available on our planet, and will expand outwardly to the rest of the solar system and beyond.

So how quickly will we be able to do this? We could send tiny self-replicating robots at close to the speed of light along with electromagnetic transmissions containing the needed software. These nanobots could then colonize far-away planets.

At this point, we run up against a seemingly intractable limit: the speed of light. Although a billion feet per second may seem fast, the Universe is spread out over such vast distances that this appears to represent a fundamental limit on how quickly an advanced civilization (such as we hope to become) can spread its influence.

There are suggestions, however, that this limit is not as immutable as it may appear. Physicists Steve Lamoreaux and Justin Torgerson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory have analyzed data from an old natural nuclear reactor that two billion years ago produced a fission reaction lasting several hundred thousand years in what is now West Africa. Analyzing radioactive isotopes left over from the reactor and comparing them to isotopes from similar nuclear reactions today, they determined that the physics constant "alpha" (also called the fine structure constant), which determines the strength of the electromagnetic force apparently has changed since two billion years ago. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and both have been considered unchangeable constants. Alpha appears to have decreased by 4.5 parts out of 108. If confirmed, this would imply that the speed of light has increased. There are other studies with similar suggestions, and there is a table top experiment now under way at Cambridge University to test the ability to engineer a small change in the speed of light.

Of course, these results will need to be carefully verified. If true, it may hold great importance for the future of our civilization. If the speed of light has increased, it has presumably done so not just because of the passage of time, but because certain conditions have changed. This is the type of scientific insight that technologists can exploit. It is the nature of engineering to take a natural, often subtle, scientific effect, and control it with a view towards greatly leveraging and magnifying it. If the speed of light has changed due to changing circumstances, that cracks open the door just enough for the capabilities of our future intelligence and technology to swing the door widely open. That is the nature of engineering. As one of many examples, consider how we have focused and amplified the subtle properties of Bernoulli's principle (that air rushing over a curved surface has a slightly lower air pressure than over a flat surface) to create the whole world of aviation.

If it turns out that we are unable to actually change the speed of light, we may nonetheless circumvent it by using wormholes (which can be thought of as folds of the universe in dimensions beyond the three visible ones) as short cuts to far away places.

In 1935, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen described "Einstein-Rosen" bridges as a way of describing electrons and other particles in terms of tiny space-time tunnels. In 1955, physicist John Wheeler described these tunnels as "wormholes," introducing the term for the first time. His analysis of wormholes showed them to be fully consistent with the theory of general relativity, which describes space as essentially curved in another dimension.

In 1988, California Institute of Technology physicists Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Uri Yertsever described in some detail how such wormholes could be engineered. Based on quantum fluctuation, so-called "empty" space is continually generating tiny wormholes the size of subatomic particles. By adding energy and following other requirements of both quantum physics and general relativity (two fields that have been notoriously difficult to integrate), these wormholes could in theory be expanded in size to allow objects larger than subatomic particles to travel through them. Sending humans would not be impossible, but extremely difficult. However, as I pointed out above, we really only need to send nanobots plus information, which could go through wormholes measured in microns rather than meters. Anders Sandberg estimates that a one-nanometer wormhole could transmit a formidable 10^69 bits per second.

Thorne and his Ph.D. students, Morris and Yertsever, also describe a method consistent with general relativity and quantum mechanics that could establish wormholes between Earth and far-away locations quickly even if the destination were many light-years away.

Physicist David Hochberg and Vanderbilt University's Thomas Kephart point out that shortly after the Big Bang, gravity was strong enough to have provided the energy required to spontaneously create massive numbers of self-stabilizing wormholes. A significant portion of these wormholes are likely to still be around, and may be pervasive, providing a vast network of corridors that reach far and wide throughout the Universe. It might be easier to discover and use these natural wormholes than to create new ones.

Would anyone be shocked if some subtle ways of getting around the speed of light were discovered? The point is that if there are even subtle ways around this limit, the technological powers that our future human-machine civilization will achieve will discover these means and leverage them to great effect.