"A few months ago, a group of authors gathered at a country house in Connecticut for a weekend, taking walks in the meadows and woods, dining alfresco and talking about their work. They did not, however, discuss movie rights, the fate of the novel or the current rash of memoirs. They talked about multiple universes, the philosophy of mathematics and the nature of consciousness.

.....This was a pastoral salon in which cosmologists, cognitive scientists, linguists and invertebrate paleontologists could discuss the evolution of the universe and the problem of whether 1 plus 1 equals 2 is a tautology, a logical formula with relevance only to itself, or whether it has a necessary connection with the physical world. It was a meeting at which the authors could consider the question of whether there are questions that are unanswerable, in principle......At the gathering in Connecticut.....were Steven Pinker ("How the Mind Works"), Lee Smolin ("The Life of the Cosmos"), Daniel Dennett ("Consciousness Explained"), Alan Guth ("The Inflationary Universe"), Nicholas Humphrey ("A History of the Mind"), Niles Eldredge ("Reinventing Darwin," "Dominion") and Frank Sulloway ("Freud," "Biologist of the Mind")."

-James Gorman, The New York Times , 10/14/97 -Science Times, p1.

That weekend at Eastover Farm in rural Connecticut was my first opportunity to meet Frank Sulloway, a fascinating character who, while never having held a formal academic position, has had an important impact on contemporary thought.

His first book, a biography of Freud, looked at the legendary figure as a scientist. His landmark study of birth order (Born to Rebel), based on 26 years of research and writing, is perhaps as important for applying the scientific method to the study of history as it is for his insight into the topic of the book. In it, Sulloway brings to bear what he calls "hypothesis testing, which is a method that saves us all from becoming either astrologers or psychoanalysts."

In this way he connects with the others in the third culture, i.e. "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

On January 21st, Steven Pinker and Steven Rose debated each other in an event chaired by Susan Blackmore and held at London University's Institute of Education under the sponsorship of Dillon's and The London Times. Over a thousand people attended-and the event was sold out within three days of being announced. I wish I had been there.

No two individuals better illustrate my notion of a "third culture" which "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

In this culture, there is no canon or accredited list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

The Two Steves have serious disagreements. But whether it's Steve Pinker weighing forth on the notion that the "problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes" or Steve Rose asserting that "it is in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate, to continually construct their-our-own futures," their debate, their disagreement sharpens and clarifies.

"[People] like themselves just as they are," says Marvin Minsky. "Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves."

Marvin believes that it is important that we "understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't—and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves."

Marvin Minsky is the leading light of AI—artificial intelligence, that is. He sees the brain as a myriad of structures. Scientists who, like Minsky, take the strong AI view believe that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the brain's cognitive abilities. Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level, abstract thought, and believes that in principle machines can do everything a conscious human being can do.

"Marvin Minsky is the smartest person I've ever known," computer scientist and cognitive researcher Roger Schank points out. "He's absolutely full of ideas, and he hasn't gotten one step slower or one step dumber. One of the things about Marvin that's really fantastic is that he never got too old. He's wonderfully childlike. I think that's a major factor explaining why he's such a good thinker. There are aspects of him I'd like to pattern myself after. Because what happens to some scientists is that they get full of their power and importance, and they lose track of how to think brilliant thoughts. That's never happened to Marvin."

MARVIN MINSKY is a mathematician and computer scientist; Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; cofounder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Logo Computer Systems, Inc., and Thinking Machines, Inc.; laureate of the Japan Prize (1990), that nation's highest distinction in science and technology; author of seven books, including The Society of Mind.

We have to put emotion back into the brain and integrate it with cognitive systems. We shouldn't study emotion or cognition in isolation, but should study both as aspects of the mind in its brain.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux seeks a biological rather than psychological understanding of our emotions. He explores the differences between emotional memories (implicit--unconscious--memories) processed in pathways that take information into the amygdala, and memories of emotion (explicit--conscious--memories) processed at the level of the hippocampus and neocortex. 

Daniel C. Dennett: Nick Humphrey is a great romantic scientist, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it isn't. Nick's early pioneering work in recording the firing of individual neurons in live animals, in cats, helped pave the way for work by the neuroscientists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. They got the 1981 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on such single-cell recordings in cats, but it was a technique that Nick had helped develop. Very typically, once he got the technique developed, he thought, "Well, I can spend the rest of my life doing this, or I can do something else. I don't see what the residual problems are." Of course, there were lots of problems, but at any rate, typical of Nick, he wanted to turn to other things as soon as he'd done that.

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