The Augmented Human Being
[3.30.16]
There are now 2000 gene therapies where you’ll take a little piece of engineered DNA, put it inside of a viral coat so all the viral genes are gone, and you can put in, say, a human gene or you can have nonviral delivery, but the important thing is that you’re delivering it either inside of the human or you’re taking cells out of the human and putting the DNA in and then putting them back in. But you can do very powerful things like curing inherited diseases, curing infectious diseases.
For example, you can edit out the receptor for the HIV virus and cure AIDS patients in a way that's not dependent upon vaccines and multidrug resistance, which has plagued the HIV AIDS story from the very beginning. You’re basically making a human being which is now augmented in a certain sense so that, unlike most humans, they are resistant to this major plague of mankind—HIV AIDS.
There are now people walking around who are genetically modified: There are some that are resistant to AIDS because they have had their T cells, or more generally, their blood cells modified. There are children that have been cured of blindness by gene therapy. None of this is CRISPR, but it’s in the same vein. CRISPR is overtaking it very quickly and it’s drafting behind all the beautiful work that’s been done with delivery of DNA, delivery of genetic components to patients.
GEORGE CHURCH is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Personal Genome Project. George Church's Edge Bio Page
Forming the Minds That Will Make the Future
The Reality Club Conversation Continues [3.30.16]
[ Editor's Note: On March 9, 2016, Edge published a conversation with Howard Gardner called "Liberal Arts and Sciences in the 21st Century." The reaction from The Reality Club was immediate, strong, and engaging, with responses from Douglas Rushkoff, Patricia Churchland, Mark Pagel, Roger Schank, Neil Gershenfeld, Cristine Legare and David Myers. Now, Gardner responds. . . . ]
Just as readers of Edge base our thoughts about higher education significantly on our own experiences, we also draw on our own more recent experiences as teachers—formal or informal—as scholars, and as human beings who continue to learn, engage, enjoy, and debate. There is no one best or one right way to engage in liberal arts learning: some benefit more from reading and writing, some from debating, some from lectures or Socratic seminars, some from travel and reflection, some from carrying out projects or tackling overwhelming challenges or creating works of art. Indeed, in my ideal school students would be exposed to several different pedagogical philosophies and practices. Not only would they benefit from this diversity, students would also have the chance to determine what works best for them and how they might optimally share with others what they’ve learned and what they can do.
HOWARD GARDNER is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gardner also directs the Good Project. Howard Gardner's Edge Bio Page
Sounds of the Skies
Hear the Spacetime Ringing [3.23.16]
The effect of these gravitational waves is to squeeze and stretch space. If you were floating near these black holes, you would literally be squeezed and stretched. If you were close enough, you would feel the difference between the squeezing and stretching on your face or your feet. We’ve even conjectured that your eardrum could ring in response, like a resonant membrane, so that you would literally hear the wave, hear it even in the absence of a medium like air. Even though we think that empty space is silent, in these circumstances you would hear the black holes collide but you wouldn’t see them; it would happen in complete darkness. The two black holes would be completely dark, and your only evidence of their collision would be to hear the spacetime ringing.
JANNA LEVIN is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots; A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines; and most recently, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. Janna Levin's Edge Bio Page
The Mattering Instinct
[3.16.16]
We can’t pursue our lives without thinking that our lives matter—though one has to be careful here to distinguish the relevant sense of “matter." Simply to take actions on the basis of desires is to act as if your life matters. It’s inconceivable to pursue a human life without these kinds of presumptions—that your own life matters to some extent. Clinical depression is when you are convinced that you don’t and will never matter. That’s a pathological attitude, and it highlights, by its pathology, the way in which the mattering instinct normally functions. To be a fully functioning, non-depressed person is to live and to act, to take it for granted that you can act on your own behalf, pursue your goals and projects. And that we have a right to be treated in accord with our own commitment to our lives mattering. We quite naturally flare up into outrage and indignation when others act in violation of the presumption grounding the pursuance of our lives. So this is what I mean by the mattering instinct, that commitment to one’s own life that is inseparable from pursuing a coherent human life.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Obama, is a philosopher, novelist, and professor of English and Philosophy at NYU. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Edge Bio Page
Verena Huber-Dyson
May 6, 1923—March 12, 2016 [3.13.16]
In 1997, my son George Dyson handed me a batch of comments dated Oct. 29, 1998—Edge #29 ("What Are Numbers, Really? A Cerebral Basis For Number Sense"), by Stanislas Dehaene and Nov. 7—Edge #30 (the subsequent Reality Club discussion) by a group of Edge researchers. I read it all with great interest, and then my head started spinning.
Anyone interested in the psychology (or even psycho-pathology) of mathematical activity could have had fun watching me these last weeks. And now here I am with an octopus of inconclusive ramblings on the Foundations bulging my in "essays" file and a proliferation of hieroglyphs in the one entitled "doodles". It is so much easier to do mathematics than to philosophize about it. My group theoretic musings, the doodles, have been a refuge all my life.
VERENA HUBER-DYSON, mathematician and logician, died yesterday in Bellingham, Washington, at the age of 92. She was Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy Department, University of Calgary, Alberta.
Born in Naples and raised in Athens until 1940, she joined the Institute for Advanced Study as a visiting member of the School of Mathematics in 1948 after obtaining her PhD from the University of Zürich with a thesis in finite group theory under Andreas Speiser in 1947. After teaching positions at Cornell University, Goucher College, San Jose State University, Adelphi University, UCLA, Mills College, and UC Berkeley (where she was a member of Tarski's Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science), she obtained tenure as an associate professor in the Mathematics department of the University of Illinois.
From 1973 to 1988, she was a professor in the Philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta Canada, where she taught graduate courses on the Foundations of Mathematics and the Philosophy and Methodology of the sciences. Her research, on the interface between Algebra and Logic, (Tarski and Novosibirsk Style) is concerned with undecidability in Group theory.
She is the author of a monograph, Gödel's theorems: a workbook on formalization (Teubner, 1991) based on her experience of teaching graduate courses and seminars on mathematical logic, formalization and its limitations to mathematics, philosophy and interdisciplinary students at the Universities of Calgary, Zürich and Monash. Verena Huber-Dyson's Edge Bio page.
VHD on Edge:
GÖDEL IN A NUTSHELL
by Verena Huber-Dyson [5.13.06]
The essence of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that you cannot have both completeness and consistency. A bold anthropomorphic conclusion is that there are three types of people; those that must have answers to everything; those that panic in the face of inconsistencies; and those that plod along taking the gaps of incompleteness as well as the clashes of inconsistencies in stride if they notice them at all, or else they succumb to the tragedy of the human condition. (…Continue)
GÖDEL AND THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL TRUTH II
A Talk with Verena Huber-Dyson [ 7.26.05 ]
[self-portrait, 1954]
I doubt that pure philosophical discourse can get us anywhere. Maybe phenomenological narrative backed by psychological and anthropological investigations can shed some light on the nature of Mathematical Truth.
As to Beauty in mathematics and the sciences, here speaks Sophocles' eyewitness in Antigone:
"... Why should I make it soft for you with tales to prove myself a liar? Truth is Right." (…Continue)
VERENA'S LAW (The 2004 Edge Annual Question)
Verena's Law of Sane Reasoning
Hone your Hunches, Jump, then backtrack to blaze a reliable trail to your Conclusion. But avoid reductions; they lead to mere counterfeits of truth. (...Continue)
ON THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS: WHY AND HOW DO MATHEMATICIANS JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS?
by Verena Huber-Dyson [2.15.98]
It is so much easier to do mathematics than to philosophize about it. (…Continue)
Verena Huber-Dyson—New Jersey, 1949
THE UNIVERSE
[3.10.16]
Best Sellers
March 27, 2016
E-BOOK NONFICTION
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#9 UNIVERSE, by John Brockman. (Harper Perennial.) Physicists and science writers explain the universe.
CONTENTS: A Golden Age of Cosmology Alan Guth The Cyclic Universe Paul Steinhardt A Balloon Producing Balloons Producing Balloons Andrei Linde Theories of the Brane Lisa Randall The Cyclic Universe Neil Turok Why Does the Universe Look the Way It Does? Sean Carroll In the Matrix Martin Rees Think About Nature Lee Smolin The Landscape Leonard Susskind Smolin vs. Susskind: The Anthropic Principle Lee Smolin, Leonard Susskind Science Is Not About Certainty Carlo Rovelli The Energy of Empty Space That Isn't Zero Lawrence Krauss Einstein: An Edge Symposium Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, Paul Steinhardt Einstein and Poincaré Peter Galison Thinking About the Universe on the Larger Scales Raphael Bousso Quantum Monkeys Seth Lloyd The Nobel Prize and After Frank Wilczek Who Cares About Fireflies? Steven Strogatz Constructor Theory David Deutsch A Theory of Roughness Benoit Mandelbrot (with an introduction by John Brockman)
Liberal Arts and Sciences in the 21st Century
[3.9.16]
It is going to be much more of a Wild West—what sorts of things get tried in education. The notion that we’re all going to be singing out of the same hymnal is just not going to be the case. And it may not be bad. The American federal system has been very effective in certain areas, but not in policies of higher education.
HOWARD GARDNER is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Gardner also directs the Good Project. Howard Gardner's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB: Douglas Rushkoff, Patricia Churchland, Mark Pagel, Roger Schank, Neil Gershenfeld, Cristine Legare, David Myers, NEW Howard Gardner response
LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES IN THE 21ST CENTURY
I think of myself as doing projects. Some of them are bigger than others. My first project was trying to understand the way in which knowledge about the brain might inform how we think about cognitive capacities. This research ultimately led to my work on the theory of Multiple Intelligence—the work of mine that got the most attention; my fifteen minutes of fame, so to speak. One reason why "MI" got a lot of attention is because you can summarize the idea very quickly: Rather than intelligence being a single thing, of which you have some, or a lot, or not much, we have a set of distinctly different intelligences. You can be very strong with musical and not with spatial or vice-versa, and so on.
AI & The Future Of Civilization
[3.1.16]
What makes us different from all these things? What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history.
The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes—execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate. We've been automating it for thousands of years. We will succeed in having very good automation of those goals. I've spent some significant part of my life building technology to essentially go from a human concept of a goal to something that gets done in the world.
There are many questions that come from this. For example, we've got these great AIs and they're able to execute goals, how do we tell them what to do?...
STEPHEN WOLFRAM, distinguished scientist, inventor, author, and business leader, is Founder & CEO, Wolfram Research; Creator, Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha & the Wolfram Language; Author, A New Kind of Science. Stephen Wolfram's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB: Nicholas Carr, Ed Regis
ED. NOTE: From an unsolicited email: "For me, watching the video in small bites gave me the same thrill as reading JJ Ulysses I looked at the screen and clapped aloud".
AI & THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION
Some tough questions. One of them is about the future of the human condition. That's a big question. I've spent some part of my life figuring out how to make machines automate stuff. It's pretty obvious that we can automate many of the things that we humans have been proud of for a long time. What's the future of the human condition in that situation?
The Genomic Ancient DNA Revolution
A New Way to Investigate the Past [2.1.16]
My experience collaborating with Svante since 2007, has been that the data we’ve looked at from the incredible samples they have has yielded surprise after surprise. Nobody had ever gotten to look at data like this before. First, there were the Neanderthals, and then there was this pinky bone from Southern Siberia. At the end of the Neanderthal project, Svante told me we have this amazing genome-wide data from another archaic human, from a little pinky bone of a little girl from a Southern Siberian cave, and asked if I'd like to get involved in analyzing it.
When we analyzed it, it was an incredible surprise: This individual was not a Neanderthal. They were in fact much more distantly related to a Neanderthal than any two humans are today from each other, and it was not a modern human. It was some very distant cousin of a Neanderthal that was living in Siberia in Central Asia at the time that this girl lived.
When we analyzed the genome of this little girl, we saw that she was related to people in New Guinea and Australia. A person related to her had contributed about 5 percent of the genomes to people in New Guinea and Australia and related people—an interbreeding event nobody had known about before. It was completely unexpected. It wasn’t in anybody’s philosophy or anybody’s prediction. It was a new event that was driven by the data and not by people’s presuppositions or previous ideas.
This is what ancient DNA does for us. When you look at the data, it doesn’t always just play into one person’s theory or the other; it doesn’t just play into the Indo-European steppe hypothesis or the Anatolian hypothesis. Sometimes it raises something completely new, like the Denisovan finger bone and the interbreeding of a gene flow from Denisovans into Australians and New Guineans.
DAVID REICH is a geneticist and professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School. David Reich's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB
ROBERT TRIVERS
Evolutionary Biologist; Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University; Author, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist
Absolutely superb ancient genomics Edge piece: Reich is riveting. I know most of the work—I teach a course on Human Evolutionary Genetics—but I knew nothing about the degree of Indian genetic admixture, for example, most fascinating as it interacts with wide-scale cousin marriages, themselves associated with such horrors as “honor killings.” As such, the very large sample sizes that genetics easily generates can then be analyzed for ancient components in ways that are often astonishing.
How else would we know that Neanderthal gene admixture of at least 40,000 years ago (~3% of all genes in modern Euro-Asian populations) is associated with 1) light skin tone, 2) blue eyes, 3) straight hair, and 4) novel parasite-resistant genes to the level possibly of allergies?! God bless archaeology and paleo-anthropology, but genomics can now tell us more about what was going on in Yorobu-land 8500 years ago and Europe 10000 years ago than can these fields. Indeed, genomics can give us a far broader picture as well, showing recently that there was modest human genetic admixture into Neanderthals some 100,000 years and some slight movement of modern human genes back into northern Africa some 4000 years ago. Of course as Reich makes clear, integration of genetics with linguistics and other fields is most helpful but genomics will continue to get much more powerful quickly, dominating other forms of evidence, whenever there is conflict.
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...[W]ith the culmination of decades of progress in building advanced computing devices and machine learning putting the world on the cusp of true AI, the ground is finally fertile for philosophers, scientists and all manner of other experts and thinkers to jump into the discussion with their own vision of the future of the thinking machine. 
