Edge: FEATURES

"Don't assume for a second that Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose and the editorial high command at the New York Times have a handle on all the pressing issues of the day....when Brockman asked 100 of the world's top thinkers to come up with pressing matters overlooked by the media, they generated a lengthy list of profound, esoteric and outright entertaining responses."
— "Web Site for Intellectuals Inspires Serious Thinking" by Elsa Arnett, San Jose Mercury News

THE "BILLIONAIRES' DIGERATI DINNER - 2000 [2.24.00]

"When the host, New York literary agent John Brockman, added three zeros to the dinner last year, there was more than a bit of giggly discomfort among the attendees.The general agreement was that the provocative Mr. Brockman, who also runs a discussion Web site called Edge.org, was poking fun more than offering a description."
— Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal

W.D. HAMILTON (1936-2000) [3.13.00]
By Richard Dawkins

W D Hamilton is a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin. Other candidates would have to include R A Fisher, whom Hamilton revered as a young student at Cambridge. Hamilton resembled Fisher in his penetrating biological intuition and his ability to render it in mathematics. But, like Darwin and unlike Fisher, he was also a superb field naturalist and explorer. I suspect that, of all his twentieth century successors, Darwin would most have enjoyed talking to Hamilton. Partly because they could have swapped jungle tales and beetle lore, partly because both were gentle and deep, but mostly because Hamilton the theorist was responsible for clearing up so many of the very problems that had intrigued and tantalised Darwin.

GENETICS PLUS TIME [3.27.00]
A Talk With Steve Jones

It does look as if Darwin was, more or less, right. Most new discoveries fit well into his ideas. At the end of the century biology looks like a more straight-forward science than it did even 20 years ago, which I find a bit surprising, because, to the public, life seems fundamentally a mess. Of course, if you concentrate only on the details they get more and more complicated. The DNA sequence is more of a mess than anyone would have ever imagined; It's not a pretty sight. But descent with modification, as Darwin put it, or genetics plus time, as we can rephrase him today, is still the foundation of life. Biology is not like physics; Newtonian physics is in a deep sense wrong, whereas Mendelism and Darwinism are in a deep sense right.

DESIGN FOR A LIFE [4.23.00]
A Talk With Patrick Bateson

Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple. They seem to think it is something that is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the book of life, including an understanding of all human behavior. Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex. What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life.

PROGRESS IN RELIGION [5.16.00]
A Talk By Freeman Dyson

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRINCE CHARLES [6.16.00]
Richard Dawkins

Your Reith lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: "Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."

STREAMS [6.15.00]
David Gelernter

When we ask ourselves what the effect will be of time coming into focus the way space came into focus during the 19th century, we can count on the fact that the consequences will be big. It won't cause the kind of change in our spiritual life that space coming into focus did, because we've moved as far outside as we can get, pretty much. We won't see any further fundamental changes in our attitude towards art or religion all that has happened already. We're apt to see other incalculably large affects on the way we deal with the world and with each other, and looking back at this world today it will look more or less the way 1800 did from the vantage point of 1900. Not just a world with fewer gadgets, but a world with a fundamentally different relationship to space and time. From the small details of our crummy software to the biggest and most abstract issues of how we deal with the world at large, this is a big story.

COOL PEOPLE IN THE HOT DESERT [6.29.00]
A Conference Designed and Organized by Huburt Burda

In June 1009, the German media entrepreneur and New Media visonary, Hubert Burda initiated the "Center for Innovative Communication" at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. The Center's mandate was to enable and enhance a European-Israeli as well as an international New Media and High Tech, dialogue and exchange.

MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution [6.29.00]
V.S. Ramachandran

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution ??which I speculate on in this essay ? is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

WAKE-UP FOR EUROPE TECH [7.10.00]
By Frank Schirrmacher

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.

Reality Club comments: George Dyson, Stewart Brand, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, Dave Myers, Clifford Pickover, Kai Krause, Jason McCabe Calacanis. Charles Simonyi, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, J.C. Herz, Lee Smolin.

RIPPLES AND PUDDLES [7.26.00]
By Hans Moravec

Like little ripples on the surface of a deep, turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of procedural thought are possible only when the turbulence is quelled. Humans achieve quiescence imperfectly by intense concentration. Much easier to discard the pesky abyss altogether: ripples are safer in a shallow pan. Numbers are better manipulated as calculus stones or abacus beads than in human memory. [Simultaneously published in German by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — Frank Schirrmacher, Publisher.]

Reality Club comments: Cliiford Pickover, Andy Clark, Ben Goertzel, Pamela McCorduck, John McCarthy.

GETTING HUMAN NATURE RIGHT [8.31.00]
A Talk With Helena Cronin

Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging — common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species. But human behavior — which is generated by that nature — is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules — the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So, the answer to 'genetic determinism' is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment. And, of course, to know which changes would be appropriate and effective, you have to know those Darwinian rules. You need only to understand human nature, not to change it.

BEYOND 2001: HAL's LEGACY FOR THE ENTERPRISE GENERATION [8.31.00]
By Frank Schirrmacher

Who, if not the Europeans, who, if not the Germans, is in a position to talk about the power role that models can acquire over reality? Wars have been fought over them and whole generations incited to violence in their name. We have studied the images and the language which gave the pioneers of the industrial revolution their confidence and we have encapsulated its life cycle — from the discovery of electricity to the sinking of the Titanic — in parables.

HUBERT BURDA — GERMANY'S AGENT OF CHANGE [10.3.00]
By John Brockman

Burda has the discipline of Germany but he also has certain qualities that Powerful Germany may not have respected in the past. He is stirring the pot, bringing people together, searching for new ideas, making things happen. When he meets talented people he brings them into his network, combines them into his mix. This is his discipline. This is his power. In addition to new people, he attracts new ideas, brings fruitful chaos to a world of certainty, shakes things up, and makes a mess out of the old order, the old way of thinking. Science (and the technology that follows) does not have to be beautiful or pure. Things do not need to be symmetrical or deducible from first principles. That esthetic, a great motivating force in science since Plato, is over. The sciences of complexity, which are the hallmark of the third culture, can be very messy. Out of chaos comes creativity. Hubert Burda is Germany's agent of change.

CROSSING CULTURES [10.12.00]
A Talk With Mary Catherine Bateson

People learn from stories in a different way from the way they learn from generalities. When I'm writing I often start out with abstractions and academic jargon, and purge it. The red pencil goes through page after page, while I try to make sure that the stories and examples remain to carry the kernel of the ideas, and in the process the ideas become more nuanced, less cut and dried. Sometimes reviewers seem to want the abstractions back, but I figure that if they were able to recognize what's being said, it didn't have to be spelled out or dressed up in pretentious technical language.

TIME LOOPS [11.3.00]
A Talk With Paul Davies

As providing an insight into the nature of reality, and the nature of the physical universe, this whole area is really fascinating. I've thought a lot about it over the years, and I'm still undecided as to whether nature could never permit such a crazy thing, or whether yes, these entities, these wormholes, or some other type of gravitational system do at least in principle exist, and in principle one could visit the past, and we have to find some way of avoiding the paradox. Maybe the way is to give up free will. Maybe that's an illusion. Maybe we can't go back and change the past freely.

Reality Club: Joseph Traub, Julian Barbour, Lee Smolin, Gregory Benford

ONE HALF OF A MANIFESTO [11.11.00]
By Jaron Lanier

For the last twenty years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before.....And so I'll here share my thoughts with the respondents of edge.org, many of whom are, as much as anyone, responsible for this revolution, one which champions the assent of cybernetic technology as culture.

The Reality Club: • George Dyson, Freeman Dyson. Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rod Brooks, Henry Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart Brand, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Daniel C. Dennett, Philip W. Anderson
The Reality Club, Part II on Jaron Lanier's .5 Manifesto • Jaron Lanier responds to comments on the .5 Manifesto from George Dyson, Freeman Dyson. Cliff Barney, Bruce Sterling, Rod Brooks, Henry Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Margaret Wertheim, John Baez, Lee Smolin, Stewart Brand, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Daniel C. Dennett, Philip W. Anderson: Lanier's postscript on Ray Kurtzweil

HOW DEMOCRACY WORKS (OR WHY PERFECT ELECTIONS SHOULD ALL END IN TIES) [11.20.00]
By W. Daniel Hillis

Many people believe that democracy works by giving voters a chance to elect a candidate whose views match their own. Actually, this isn't true. In a perfectly functioning democracy, both candidates will appear equally imperfect, elections' voter turnout will often be low, and all elections will end in near ties. The illustrations below show why this is true. They also show why a two-party system is better than a many-party system. Voters are more likely to like their choice of candidates in a many-party system, but they are less likely to like the winner of the election.

Reality Club: Jaron Lanier

IT'S A MUCH BIGGER THING THAN IT LOOKS [11.20.00]
A Talk with David Deutsch

However useful the theory [of quantum computation] 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.

GOLDSMITH VS. ZIMMERMAN [11.23.00]
By George Dyson

I count nine bits of chad on the carpet after all the ballots are run. The chad may just have fallen innocently out of the innards of the machine, it may have fallen out of any number of punch positions which had nothing to do with the city council race, or one or more bits might have fallen out of the Zimmerman-Goldsmith positions. Who knows? The seconds tick by, and I am acutely conscious at this instant that language and reality sometimes coincide: in the punched card universe a "bit" really is a bit, and Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "any difference that makes a difference" is true indeed, as we await the count of how many bits of difference between card and not-card have just passed through the Cardamation machine.

NATURAL BORN CYBORGS? [12.29.00]
By Andy Clark

We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature's very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind.

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