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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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