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THE
WORLD QUESTION CENTER — 2004 [1.12.04]
"WHAT'S
YOUR LAW?"
There
is some bit of wisdom, some rule
of nature, some law-like pattern,
either grand or small, that you've
noticed in the universe that might
as well be named after you. Gordon
Moore has one; Johannes Kepler
and Michael Faraday, too. So does
Murphy.
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THE
MOUNTAIN AND THE CLOCK [1.18.04]
By Stewart Brand
As
we spent more time climbing to the cliffs and
hanging out on and around them, they rewarded
us more and more. They taught us this: most of
the amazingness of the Clock we can borrow from
the amazingness of the mountain. The more we
highlight and blend in with the most spectacular
/archive/archive_ of the mountain, the more memorable
a Clock visit will be for the time pilgrims.
It's a Mountain Clock. |
LANGUAGE,
BIOLOGY, AND THE MIND [1.28.04]
A Talk with Gary Marcus
For a long time the fields of biology and psychology have been quite
separate, and only in the last few years people have started thinking
about brain imaging and about how the brain and mind relate. But they
haven't really thought that much about another part of biology: developmental
biology. Brain imaging tells you something about how the brain works,
but that doesn't tell you anything about how the brain gets to be the
way that it is. Of course, we also have the human genome sequence and
have made enormous advances in genetics and related fields, and what
I've been trying to do in the last few years is to relate all of the
advances in biology to what people have been finding out in cognitive
development and language acquisition. |
AFFECTIVE
FORECASTING...OR...THE BIG WOMBASSA: WHAT YOU THINK
YOU'RE GOING TO GET, AND WHAT YOU DON'T GET, WHEN YOU
GET WHAT YOU WANT [2.13.04]
A Talk with Daniel Gilbert
The problem lies in how we imagine our future hedonic
states. We are the only animals that can peer deeply
into our futures—the
only animal that can travel mentally through time, preview a variety
of futures, and choose the one that will bring us the greatest pleasure
and/or the least pain. This is a remarkable adaptation—which,
incidentally, is directly tied to the evolution of the frontal lobe—because
it means that we can learn from mistakes before we make them.
We don't have to actually have gallbladder surgery or lounge around
on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another.
We may do this better than any other animal, but our research suggests
that we don't do it perfectly. Our ability to simulate the future
and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed,
and that people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they expect to
be. |
EUDAEMONIA,
THE GOOD LIFE [3.23.04]
A Talk with Martin Seligman
The
third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again
knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying
those in the service of something you believe is
larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that.
That's what life is about. There will likely be
a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a
pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but
it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology
of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a
pharmacology of meaning.
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THE
BILLIONAIRES' DINNER — 2004 [3.23.04]
February 26th — Monterey,
California
My
idea was to use the platform of "The
Billionaires' Dinner" and Seth's visit
to announce "The Quantum Internet" but
I became so caught up in the high energy
of of the occasion that I forgot all about
it. I also forgot I had a new digital camera
in my pocket and didn't take any pictures.
Rather than deprive Edge readers
of an inside look at the dinner, I sent the
following email to the dinner guests:
"Sing
for your supper!"
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LEARNING
TO EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED [4.19.04]
A Talk with Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A
black swan is an outlier, an event that lies
beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most
people expect all swans to be white because that's
what their experience tells them; a black swan
is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people
tend to concoct explanations for them after the
fact, which makes them appear more predictable,
and less random, than they are. Our minds are
designed to retain, for efficient storage, past
information that fits into a compressed narrative.
This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents
us from adequately learning from the past. |
JOHN
MAYNARD SMITH (1920—2004) [5.6.04]
By Richard Dawkins
Some successful scientists make their
careers by hammering away at one experimental
technique that they are good at, and by gathering
a gang of co-workers to do the donkey work.
Their continued success rests primarily on
their ability to coax a steady supply of money
out of the government. John Maynard Smith,
by contrast, makes his way almost entirely
by original thought, needing to spend very
little money, and there is scarcely a branch
of evolutionary or population genetic theory
that has not been illuminated by his vivid
and versatile inventiveness. He is one of that
rare company of scientists that changes the
way people think. |
"ARISTOTLE" (THE
KNOWLEDGE WEB) [5.6.04]
By
W. Daniel Hillis
With
the knowledge web, humanity's accumulated store
of information will become more accessible, more
manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants
to learn will be able to find the best and the
most meaningful explanations of what they want
to know. Anyone with something to teach will
have a way to reach those who what to learn.
Teachers will move beyond their present role
as dispensers of information and become guides,
mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge
web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web
is an idea whose time has come.
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NATURAL-BORN
DUALISTS [5.13.04]
A Talk with Paul Bloom
In
the domain of bodies, most of us accept that common sense
is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are
actually mostly empty space, consisting of tiny particles
and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation
will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to
be broadly recognized that our dualist belief system, though
intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken. Perhaps we
will all come to agree with Richard Dawkins and Daniel
Dennett and join the side of the "brights": those
who reject the supernatural and endorse the world-view
established by science...But I am skeptical. The notion
that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many,
as it clashes with religion. Dualism and religion are not
the same: You can be dualist without holding any other
religious beliefs, and you can hold religious beliefs without
being dualist. But they almost always go together. And
some very popular religious views rest on a dualist foundation,
such as the belief that people survive the destruction
of their bodies. If you give up on dualism, this is what
you lose...This is not small potatoes.
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AN
ECO-EVOLUTIONARY DANCE THROUGH DEEP TIME [6.17.04]
A Talk with Scott Sampson
How
did the world of dinosaurs differ from
our own? Since we live in a miniscule
snapshot in time, most people can’t
relate to a thousand years, let alone
millions, or billions of years. So how
do we get our minds wrapped around Mesozoic
timescapes? And once we’re there,
how do we then recreate the world of
dinosaurs? |
A SELF WORTH HAVING [6.30.04]
A Talk with Nicholas Humphrey
Amidst
all the self serving rhetoric, I think Edge should
contribute its own obsequy. The people who died were
scientists. Whatever else they may have believed in,
their goal was to learn and to explore.
Contributors:
Oliver Morton, Gregory Benford, George Dyson, Nicholas
Humphey, Paul Davies, Martin Rees, Karl Sabbagh, Piet
Hut, Gerald Holton |
THE
NEXT STEP, A NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE? [7.21.04]
Richard Dawkins
Novelists
may win the plaudits, but they don't have all the good
stories...
Richard Dawkins gives advice to entrants to a competition for young science
writers.
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SMOLIN
VS, SUSSKIND: THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE: A PHYSICS SHOOTOUT [8.18.04]
Recently, I received a copy of an email
sent by Leonard Susskind to a group of physicists
which included an attached file entitled "Answer
to Smolin". This was the opening salvo
of an intense email exchange between Susskind
and Smolin concerning Smolin's argument that "the
Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable
predictions, and therefore cannot be a part
of science". |
THE
ASTONISHING FRANCIS CRICK [[10.18.04]
by V.S. Ramachanran
As
I was leaving he said "Rama, I think
the secret of consciousness lies in the claustrum—don't
you? Why else would this one tiny structure
be connected to so many areas in the brain?"—and
he gave me a sly, conspiratorial wink. It
was the last time I saw him.
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A
FULL-FORCE STORM WITH GALE WINDS BLOWING [10.18.04]
A Talk with Robert Trivers
For
the last ten or fifteen years, I've been trying to
understand situations in nature in which the genes
within a single individual are in disagreement—or
put differently, in which genes within an individual
are selected in conflicting directions. It's an enormous
topic, which 20 years ago looked like a shadow on the
horizon, just as about a hundred years ago what later
became relativity theory was just two little shadows
on the horizon of physics, and blew up to become major
developments. In genetics it's fair to say that about
20 years ago a cloud on the horizon was our knowledge
that there were so-called selfish genetic elements
in various species that propagated themselves at the
expense of the larger organism. What was then just
a cloud on the horizon is now a full-force storm with
gale winds blowing.
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GREGORY
BATESON — THE CENTENNIAL [11.20.04]
"About
Bateson" by John Brockman with an Afterword
by Gregory Bateson
Bateson
contended that as a result of advances in cybernetics
and fundamental mathematics, many other areas
of thought have shifted. In The Evolutionary
Idea, a proposed new book, he planned to
gather together those new advances to present
an alternative to then current orthodox theories
of evolutio1n. This alternative view was to stress
the role of information, that is, of mind,
in all levels of biology from genetics to ecology
and from human culture to the pathology of schizophrenia.
In place of natural selection of organisms, Bateson
considered the survival of patterns, ideas, and
forms of interaction. |
INDIRECT
RECIPROCITY, ASSESSMENT HARDWIRING, AND REPUTATION ([12.6.04]
A Talk with Karl Sigmund
These
ideas fed into our work on indirect reciprocity,
a concept that was first introduced by Robert Trivers
in a famous paper in the 1970s. I recall that he
mentioned this idea obliquely when he wrote about
something he called "general altruism". Here you
give something back not to the person to whom you
owe something, but to somebody else in society.
He pointed out that this also works with regard
to cooperation at a high level. Trivers didn't
go into details, because at the time it was not
really at the center of his thinking. He was mostly
interested in animal behavior, and so far indirect
reciprocity has not been proven to exist in animal
behavior. It might exist in some cases, but ethologists
are still debating the pros and cons. |
A
THEORY OF ROUGHNESS [12.20.04]
A Talk with Benoit Mandelbrot
A
recent, important turn in my life occurred when
I realized that something that I have long been
stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee.
I have engaged myself, without realizing it, in
undertaking a theory of roughness. Think of color,
pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is
the topic of a branch of physics. Chemistry is
filled with acids, sugars, and alcohols — all
are concepts derived from sensory perceptions.
Roughness is just as important as all those other
raw sensations, but was not studied for its own
sake.
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