Summer Reading: Highlights From the Edge Archive
[7.18.16]"Deliciously creative, the variety astonishes. Intellectual skyrockets of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is doing what Edge is doing...the greatest virtual research university in the world.
— Denis Dutton, Founding Editor, Arts & Letters Daily
[ED NOTE: It’s summer and a good time to reflect on twenty years of Edge. Each week through the rest of the season, we will revisit five highlights from the Edge archives worthy of your time and attention. — JB]
The idea of a quantum computer, as it's been put forward by David Deutsch, Richard Feynman, and various other people, is that the computations are the things that are superposed. Rather than your computer doing one computation, it does a lot of them all at once. This may be, under certain circumstances, very efficient. The problem comes at the end, when you have to get one piece of information out of the superposition of all those different computations. It's extremely difficult to have a system that does this usefully.
THE EMERGENT SELF
Francisco Varela
[May 1, 1996]
My view of the mind has been influenced by my interest in Buddhist thought. Buddhists are specialists in understanding this notion of a virtual self—a selfless self—from the inside, as lived experience. This is what fascinates me about that tradition. Dan Dennett, incidentally, has come to the same conclusion in his own way. But while Dan focuses on the cognitive level, my own approach is to think about several biological levels, as I have mentioned, perhaps because I'm influenced by the broad idea of nonrepresentationalist knowledge. In my reality, knowledge coevolves with the knower and not as an outside, objective representation.
GAIA IS A TOUGH BITCH
Lynn Margulis
[May 1, 1996]
Gaia is a tough bitch—a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.
THE CHEF
Nathan Myhrvold
[January 23, 1997]
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; 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.
ORGANS OF COMPUTATION
Steven Pinker
[January 10, 1997]
The Internet does create a kind of supra-human intelligence, in which everyone on the planet can exchange information rapidly—a bit like the way different parts of a single brain can exchange information. This is not a new process; it's been happening since we evolved language. . . . Everything that's happened since, such as writing, the printing press, and now the Internet, are ways of magnifying something that our species already knew how to do, which is to pool expertise by communication. Language was the real innovation in our biological evolution; everything since has just made our words travel farther or last longer.
THE END OF TIME
Julian Barbour
[August 15, 1999]
One of the great questions in physics is whether there's some sort of invisible framework in which everything unfolds. Newton introduced the notions of absolute space and absolute time. Absolute space is like a translucent glass block that stretches from infinity to infinity; it's a fixed frame of reference in which everything happens. Newtonian time is like some invisible river that flows uniformly forever. The trouble with this is that we can't see this invisible framework, all we see are things moving relative to each other. This is the relational viewpoint, as opposed to the absolute viewpoint of Newton. The challenge has been to create a theory containing genuine relationships between genuine things, and not relationships between real things and unobservable things. That's what I've spent a lot of my time working on. It's given me the ideas which I'm trying now to develop into a complete cosmology, a complete explanation of what the universe is.
IT'S A MUCH BIGGER THING THAN IT LOOKS
David Deutsch
[November 19, 2000]
However useful the theory as such is today, and however spectacular the practical applications may be in the distant future, the really important thing is the philosophical implications—epistemological and metaphysical—and the implications for theoretical physics itself. One of the most important implications from my point of view is one that we get before we even build the first qubit [quantum bit]. The very structure of the theory already forces upon us a view of physical reality as a multiverse. Whether you call this the multiverse or "parallel universes" or "parallel histories," or "many histories," or "many minds"—there are now half a dozen or more variants of this idea—what the theory of quantum computation does is force us to revise our explanatory theories of the world, to recognize that it is a much bigger thing than it looks. I'm trying to say this in a way that is independent of interpretation: It's a much bigger thing than it looks.
WAKE-UP CALL FOR EUROPE TECH
Frank Schirrmacher
[July 9, 2005]
The European intelligentsia is entering the 21st century in silence, stubbornly or clumsily avoiding the issue. It is easy to imagine one of these intellectuals fumbling over a new word-processing package—the infuriation at this "not coping," the alleged lack of "technical know-how," the antipathy (often justified) which sets in at the slightest whiff of leads and sockets. All this also characterizes prevailing attitudes to the revolutionary paradigm shift itself. The new age didn't come to us Europeans in a flash of inspiration, it came as a "retraining program": from typewriter to computer, from computer to Internet.
A GOLDEN AGE OF COSMOLOGY
Alan Guth
[December 2, 2001]
HE CONFUSES 1 AND 2 AND THE 200 I.Q.
James Lee Byars, John Brockman
[July 16, 1997]
WHAT EVOLUTION IS
Ernst Mayr
[December 31, 1999]
AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS
Dan Sperber
[July 26, 2005]
A THEORY OF ROUGHNESS
Benoit Mandelbrot
[December 19, 2004]
A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES
Janna Levin
[August 14, 2005]
THE SCIENCE OF GENDER—A DEBATE
Elizabeth Spelke, Steven Pinker
[May 16, 2005]
SIGNATURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Stanislas Dehaene
[November 24, 2009]
THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY
Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Joshua Knobe, Elizabeth Phelps, and David Pizarro
[July 20, 2010]
LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!
Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd
[August 25, 2007]
CONSCIOUSNESS IS A BIG SUITCASE
Marvin Minsky
[February 26, 1998]
"ARISTOTLE" (THE KNOWLEDGE WEB)
W. Daniel Hillis
[May 6, 2004]
RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT
Daniel L. Everett
[June 11, 2007]
INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Pattie Maes
[January 20, 1998]
THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST
Mahzarin Banaji, Anthony Greenwald
[February 12, 2008]
HOW TO GET RICH
Jared Diamond
[June 6, 1999]
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Steven Pinker
[September 27, 2011]
CROSSING CULTURES
Mary Catherine Bateson
[October 11, 2000]
Why We're Different
[6.29.16]
What we're trying to do in behavioral genetics and medical genetics is explain differences. It's important to know that we all share approximately 99 percent of our DNA sequence. If we sequence, as we can now readily do, all of our 3 billion base pairs of DNA, we will be the same at over 99 percent of all those bases. That's what makes us similar to each other. It makes us similar to chimps and most mammals. We're over 90 percent similar to all mammals. There's a lot of genetic similarity that's important from an evolutionary perspective, but it can't explain why we're different. That's what we're up to, trying to explain why some children are reading disabled, or some people become schizophrenic, or why some people suffer from alcoholism, et cetera. We're always talking about differences. The only genetics that makes a difference is that 1 percent of the 3 billion base pairs. But that is over 10 million base pairs of DNA. We're looking at these differences and asking to what extent they cause the differences that we observe.
ROBERT PLOMIN is a professor of behavioral genetics at King's College London and deputy director of the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Robert Plomin's Edge Bio Page
Deontology Or Trustworthiness?
[6.16.16]
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: The benefit that people get from taking a deontological position is that they look more trustworthy. Let's look at the other side of this. If I take a consequentialist position, it means that you can't trust me because, under some circumstances, I might decide to break the rule in my interaction with you. I was puzzled when I was looking at this. What is the essence of what is going on here? Is it deontology or trustworthiness? It doesn't seem to be the same to say we are wired to like people who take a deontological position, or we are wired to like people who are trustworthy. Which of these two is it?
MOLLY CROCKETT: What the work suggests is that we infer how trustworthy someone is going to be by observing the kinds of judgments and decisions that they make. If I'm interacting with you, I can't get inside your head. I don't know what your utility function looks like. But I can infer what that utility function is by the things that you say and do.
This is one of the most important things that we do as humans. I've become increasingly interested in how we build mental models of other people's preferences and beliefs and how we make inferences about what those are, based on observables. We infer how trustworthy someone is going to be based on their condemnation of wrongdoing and their advocating a hard-and-fast morality over one that's more flexible.
MOLLY CROCKETT is an associate professor of experimental psychology, fellow of Jesus College, and distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Oxford. Molly Crockett's Edge Bio Page
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013). He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton, and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
Misunderstanding Positive Emotion
[5.25.16]
We know that in the physical ecosystem biodiversity is healthy and important. People can buy into that. We know that biodiversity fosters resistance to pathogens and invasive species. When you explain to someone that the human mind may not be so different, that it's important to have a diverse array of emotions—joy, sadness, love, admiration, guilt—and that these are all important pieces of our internal human emotional ecosystem, people can understand that. People appreciate that diversity is important, that maybe it's some sort of spice of mental life.
When you frame it that way, people are more readily able to not put such a premium on positive emotions and, in some situations, try to foster other kinds of experiences if they think it's part of a more diverse psychological life and repertoire. Framing it less as pushing positive emotions down, but as letting all emotions grow and thrive. They're all important sources of information for us and we have them for a reason. We have evolutionary goals; people can understand that. That's one way we've been thinking about trying to frame this. You don't just want to grow one kind of plant in your garden, you want to have a diverse array.
JUNE GRUBER is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychopathology Laboratory. June Gruber's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB: Robert Provine
The Social Construction of Stories
How Narratives Can Get in the Way of Being Happier [5.13.16]
I went for dinner with a friend who spent the whole of the evening complaining about her job, her boss, her colleagues, and her commute. Everything about her day-to-day experiences was miserable. Then, at the end of dinner, she said, "I love where I work." That's quite common. She was working for an organization where she'd always wanted to work, her parents were proud, her friends were jealous. How could she not be happy when she thought about the story of how happy she was where she was working? Her experiences—day-to-day and moment-to-moment—were telling her something quite different.
I'm interested in where these narratives come from, particularly those narratives that sometimes get in the way of us being happier. There's been a lot of psychological research on how stories are helpful for us; for example, in the case of experiencing adversity or trauma. If we look for explanation and reason through narrative, it helps us cope with the adverse consequences. There's been a lot of work on that. I'm interested more in the social constructions of the stories, in the things that evolution, society, our parents, or historical accident tell us about the lives that we ought to be leading, and in particular, how they might sometimes get in the way of us experiencing better lives.
PAUL DOLAN is a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of Happiness by Design. Paul Dolan's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB: Elaine Pagels
Is Big Data Taking Us Closer to the Deeper Questions in Artificial Intelligence?
[5.4.16]
What we need to do in artificial intelligence is turn back to psychology. Brute force is great; we're using it in a lot of ways, like speech recognition, license plate recognition, and for categorization, but there are still some things that people do a lot better. We should be studying human beings to understand how they do it better.
People are still much better at understanding sentences, paragraphs, books, and discourse where there's connected prose. It's one thing to do a keyword search. You can find any sentence you want that's out there on the web by just having the right keywords, but if you want a system that could summarize an article for you in a way that you trust, we're nowhere near that. The closest thing we have to that might be Google Translate, which can translate your news story into another language, but not at a level that you trust. Again, trust is a big part of it. You would never put a legal document into Google Translate and think that the answer is correct.
GARY MARCUS is CEO and founder, Geometric Intelligence; professor of psychology, New York University; author, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. Gary Marcus's Edge Bio Page
A Characteristic Difference
When Experimental Philosophy Meets Psychology [4.26.16]
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: We're at the nub of the question. You come from philosophy, so there are certain things that are of interest to you. You want to convey two things at once: that the question is exciting, and that you have something new to say about it. It is true that I, as a psychologist, would come to the same question and conclude that it's an impossible question. Those are two impossible questions, and I certainly would not expect people to answer them in any way that is coherent.
My first assumption, coming to it as a psychologist, is that there is no coherence. You agree with me that there is no coherence. What makes it exciting from the point of view of philosophy is that there is no coherence. Whereas, as a psychologist, I take it for granted that there is no coherence, so it's less exciting. That could be one of the differences.
JOSHUA KNOBE: That's really helpful. The thing we showed is not just that it is incoherent but along which dimension it is incoherent. It seems like there was evidence already that there's something pulling us towards one side and something pulling us to the other side, and we want to know which thing is pulling us towards one side or the other. We suggested that it's this difference between abstract thinking and concrete thinking....
JOSHUA KNOBE is an experimental philosopher and professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University. Joshua Knobe's Edge Bio Page
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013). He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton, and author of Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
