"WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?"

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE?""

The answers...exert an un- questionable morbid fascination — those are the very ideas that scientists cannot confess in their technical papers.

God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap: Fourteen scientists ponder everything from string theory to true love.

That's what online magazine The Edge - the World Question Center asked over 120 scientists, futurists, and other interesting minds. Their answers are sometimes short and to the point

Bangladesh—The cynic and the optimist, the agnostic and the believer, the rationalist and the obscurantist, the scientist and the speculative philosopher, the realist and the idealist-all converge on a critical point in their thought process where reasoning loses its power.

Il Sole 24 Ore-Domenica Segnalate le vostre cuioosita, chiederemo riposta alle persone piu autorevoli

The Edge Annual Question — 2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

January 1, 2006

To the Edge Community,

Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.  A realistic biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, the chemistry of materials: all are questions of critical importance with respect to what it means to be human. For the first time, we have the tools and the will to undertake the scientific study of human nature.

What you will find emerging out of the 119 original essays in the 75,000 word document written in response to the 2006 Edge Question — "What is your dangerous idea?" — are indications of a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems — whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself — were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it.

Welcome to Edge. Welcome to "dangerous ideas". Happy New Year.

John Brockman
Publisher & Editor

119 contributors [75,000 words]: Martin Rees J. Craig Venter Leo Chalupa V.S. Ramachandran David Buss Paul Bloom Philip Campbell Jesse Bering Paul Ewald Bart Kosko Matt Ridley David Pizarro Randolph Nesse Gregory Benford Marco Iacoboni Barry C. Smith Philip W. Anderson Timothy Taylor Oliver Morton Samuel Barondes David Bodanis Nicholas Humphrey Eric Fischl Stanislas Dehaene Joel Garreau Helen Fisher Paul Davies April Gornik Jamshed Bharucha Jordan Pollack Juan Enriquez Stephen Kosslyn Jerry Coyne Ernst Pöppel Geoffrey Miller Robert Shapiro Kai Krause Carlo Rovelli Richard Dawkins Seth Lloyd Carolyn Porco Michael Nesmith Lawrence Krauss Daniel C. Dennett Daniel Gilbert Andy Clark Sherry Turkle Steven Strogatz Terrence Sejnowski Lynn Margulis Thomas Metzinger Diane Halpern Gary Marcus Jaron Lanier W. Daniel Hillis Neil Gershenfeld Paul Steinhardt Sam Harris Scott Atran Marcelo Gleiser Douglas Rushkoff Judith Rich Harris Alun Anderson Todd Feinberg Stewart Brand Jared Diamond Leonard Susskind Gerald Holton Charles Seife Karl Sabbagh Rupert Sheldrake Tor Nørretranders John Horgan Eric R. Kandel Daniel Goleman Brian Greene David Gelernter Mahzarin Banaji Rodney Brooks Lee Smolin Alison Gopnik Kevin Kelly Denis Dutton Simon Baron-Cohen Freeman Dyson Gregory Cochran George B. Dyson Keith Devlin Frank Tipler Scott Sampson Jeremy Bernstein Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Irene Pepperberg Brian Goodwin Rudy Rucker Steven Pinker Richard E. Nisbett Robert Provine Donald Hoffman Marc D. Hauser Ray Kurzweil Haim Harari David G. Myers Clay Shirky Michael Shermer Arnold Trehub Roger Schank Susan Blackmore David Lykken Clifford Pickover John Allen Paulos James O'Donnell Philip Zimbardo Richard Foreman John Gottman Piet Hut Dan Sperber Martin E.P. Seligman Howard Gardner

HOWARD GARDNER
Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Changing Minds

MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN
Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, Author, Authentic Happiness

DAN SPERBER
Social and cognitive scientist, CNRS, Paris; author, Explaining Culture


Culture is natural

A number of us — biologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists or philosophers — have been trying to lay down the foundations for a truly naturalistic approach to culture. Sociobiologists and cultural ecologists have explored the idea that cultural behaviors are biological adaptations to be explained in terms of natural selection. Memeticists inspired by Richard Dawkins argue that cultural evolution is an autonomous Darwinian selection process merely enabled but not governed by biological evolution.

Evolutionary psychologists, Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd and Richerson, and I are among those who, in different ways, argue for more complex interactions between biology and culture. These naturalistic approaches have been received not just with intellectual objections, but also with moral and political outrage: this is a dangerous idea, to be strenuously resisted, for it threatens humanistic values and sound social sciences.

When I am called a "reductionist", I take it as a misplaced compliment: a genuine reduction is a great scientific achievement, but, too bad, the naturalistic study of culture I advocate does not to reduce to that of biology or of psychology. When I am called a "positivist" (an insult among postmodernists), I acknowledge without any sense of guilt or inadequacy that indeed I don't believe that all facts are socially constructed. On the whole, having one's ideas described as "dangerous" is flattering.

Dangerous ideas are potentially important. Braving insults and misrepresentations in defending these ideas is noble. Many advocates of naturalistic approaches to culture see themselves as a group of free-thinking, deep-probing scholars besieged by bigots.

But wait a minute! Naturalistic approaches can be dangerous: after all, they have been. The use of biological evidence and arguments purported to show that there are profound natural inequalities among human "races", ethnic groups, or between women and men is only too well represented in the history of our disciplines. It is not good enough for us to point out (rightly) that 1) the science involved is bad science,
2) even if some natural inequality were established, it would not come near justifying any inequality in rights, and 3) postmodernists criticizing naturalism on political grounds should begin by rejecting Heidegger and other reactionaries in their pantheon who also have been accomplices of policies of discrimination. This is not enough because the racist and sexist uses of naturalism are not exactly unfortunate accidents.

Species evolve because of genetic differences among their members; therefore you cannot leave biological difference out of a biological approach. Luckily, it so happens that biological differences among humans are minor and don't produce sub-species or "races," and that human sexual dimorphism is relatively limited. In particular, all humans have mind/brains made up of the same mechanisms, with just fine-tuning differences. (Think how very different all this would be if — however improbably — Neanderthals had survived and developed culturally like we did so that there really were different human "races").

Given what anthropologists have long called "the psychic unity of the human kind", the fundamental goal for a naturalistic approach is to explain how a common human nature — and not biological differences among humans — gives rise to such a diversity of languages, cultures, social organizations. Given the real and present danger of distortion and exploitation, it must be part of our agenda to take responsibility for the way this approach is understood by a wider public.

This, happily, has been done by a number of outstanding authors capable of explaining serious science to lay audiences, and who typically have made the effort of warning their readers against misuses of biology. So the danger is being averted, and let's just move on? No, we are not there yet, because the very necessity of popularizing the naturalistic approach and the very talent with which this is being done creates a new danger, that of arrogance.

We naturalists do have radical objections to what Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have called the "Standard Social Science Model." We have many insightful hypotheses and even some relevant data. The truth of the matter however is that naturalistic approaches to culture have so far remained speculative, hardly beginning to throw light on just fragments of the extraordinarily wide range of detailed evidence accumulated by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and others. Many of those who find our ideas dangerous fear what they see as an imperialistic bid to take over their domain.

The bid would be unrealistic, and so is the fear. The real risk is different. The social sciences host a variety of approaches, which, with a few high profile exceptions, all contribute to our understanding of the domain. Even if it involves some reshuffling, a naturalistic approach should be seen as a particularly welcome and important addition. But naturalists full of grand claims and promises but with little interest in the competence accumulated by others are, if not exactly dangerous, at least much less useful than they should be, and the deeper challenge they present to social scientists' mental habits is less likely to be properly met.

PIET HUT
Professor of Astrophysics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

A radical reevaluation of the character of time

Copernicus and Darwin took away our traditional place in the world and our traditional identity in the world. What traditional trait will be taken away from us next? My guess is that it will be the world itself.

We see the first few steps in that direction in the physics, mathematics and computer science of the twentieth century, from quantum mechanics to the results obtained by Gödel, Turing and others. The ontologies of our worlds, concrete as well as abstract, have already started to melt away.

The problem is that quantum entanglement and logical incompleteness lack the in-your-face quality of a spinning earth and our kinship with apes. We will have to wait for the ontology of the traditional world to unravel further, before the avant-garde insights will turn into a real revolution.

Copernicus upset the moral order, by dissolving the strict distinction between heaven and earth. Darwin did the same, by dissolving the strict distinction between humans and other animals. Could the next step be the dissolution of the strict distinction between reality and fiction?

For this to be shocking, it has to come in a scientifically respectable way, as a very precise and inescapable conclusion — it should have the technical strength of a body of knowledge like quantum mechanics, as opposed to collections of opinions on the level of cultural relativism.

Perhaps a radical reevaluation of the character of time will do it. In everyday experience, time flows, and we flow with it. In classical physics, time is frozen as part of a frozen spacetime picture. And there is, as yet, no agreed-upon interpretation of time in quantum mechanics.

What if a future scientific understanding of time would show all previous pictures to be wrong, and demonstrate that past and future and even the present do not exist? That stories woven around our individual personal history and future are all just wrong? Now that would be a dangerous idea.

JOHN GOTTMAN
Psychologist; Founder of Gottman Institute; Author, The Mathematics of Marriage.

Emotional intelligence

The most dangerous idea I know of is emotional intelligence. Within the context of the cognitive neuroscience revolution in psychology, the focus on emotions is extraordinary. The over-arching idea that there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, that it has a neuroscience, that it is inter-personal, i.e., between two brains, rather than within one brain, are all quite revolutionary concepts about human psychology. I could go on. It is also a revolution in thinking about infancy, couples, family, adult development, aging, etc.

RICHARD FOREMAN
Founder & Director, Ontological-Hysteric Theater


Radicalized relativity

In my area of the arts and humanities, the most dangerous idea (and the one under who's influence I have operated throughout my artistic life) is the complete relativity of all positions and styles of procedure. The notion that there are no "absolutes" in art — and in the modern era, each valuable effort has been, in one way or another, the highlighting and glorification of elements previous "off limits" and rejected by the previous "classical" style.

Such a continual "reversal of values" has of course delivered us into the current post-post modern era, in which fragmentation, surface value and the complex weave of "sampling procedure" dominate, and "the center does not hold".

I realize that my own artistic efforts have, in a small way, contributed to the current aesthetic/emotional environment in which the potential spiritual depth and complexity of evolved human consciousness is trumped by the bedazzling shuffle of the shards of inherited elements — never before as available to the collective consciousness. The resultant orientation towards "cultural relativity" in the arts certainly comes in part from the psychic re-orientation resulting from Einstein's bombshell dropped at the beginning of the last century.

This current "relativity" of all artistic, philosophical, and psychological values leaves the culture adrift, and yet there is no "going back" in spite of what conservative thinkers often recommend.

At the very moment of our cultural origin, we were warned against "eating from the tree of knowledge". Down through subsequent history, one thing has led to another, until now — here we are, sinking into the quicksand of the ever-accelerating reversal of each latest value (or artistic style). And yet — there are many artists, like myself, committed to the believe that — having been "thrown by history" into the dangerous trajectory initiated by the inaugural "eating from the tree of knowledge" (a perhaps "fatal curiosity" programmed into our genes) the only escape possible is to treat the quicksand of the present as a metaphorical "black hole" through which we must pass — indeed risking psychic destruction (or "banalization") — for the promise of emerging re-made, in new still unimaginable form, on the other side.

This is the "heroic wager" the serious "experimental" artist makes in living through the dangerous idea of radicalized relativity. It is ironic, of course, that many of our greatest scientists (not all of course) have little patience for the adventurous art of our times (post Stockhausen/Boulez music, post Joyce/ Mallarme literature) and seem to believe that a return to a safer "audience friendly" classical style is the only responsible method for today's artists.

Do they perhaps feel psychologically threatened by advanced styles that supercede previous principals of coherence? They are right to feel threatened by such dangerous advances into territory for which conscious sensibility if not yet fully prepared. Yet it is time for all serious minds to "bite the bullet" of such forays into the unknown world in which the dangerous quest for deeper knowledge leads scientist and artist alike.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University; Author: Shyness

The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism

Those people who become perpetrators of evil deeds and those who become perpetrators of heroic deeds are basically alike in being just ordinary, average people.

The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism. Both are not the consequence of dispositional tendencies, not special inner attributes of pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome. Both emerge in particular situations at particular times when situational forces play a compelling role in moving individuals across the decisional line from inaction to action.

There is a decisive decisional moment when the individual is caught up in a vector of forces emanating from the behavioral context. Those forces combine to increase the probability of acting to harm others or acting to help others. That decision may not be consciously planned or taken mindfully, but impulsively driven by strong situational forces external to the person. Among those action vectors are group pressures and group identity, diffusion of responsibility, temporal focus on the immediate moment without entertaining costs and benefits in the future, among others.

The military police guards who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the prison guards in my Stanford Prison experiment who abused their prisoners illustrate the "Lord of the Flies" temporary transition of ordinary individuals into perpetrators of evil. We set aside those whose evil behavior is enduring and extensive, such as tyrants like Idi Amin, Stalin and Hitler. Heroes of the moment are also contrasted with lifetime heroes.

The heroic action of Rosa Parks in a Southern bus, of Joe Darby in exposing the Abu Ghraib tortures, of NYC firefighters at the World Trade Center's disaster are acts of bravery at that time and place. The heroism of Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi is replete with valorous acts repeated over a lifetime. That chronic heroism is to acute heroism as valour is to bravery.

This view implies that any of us could as easily become heroes as perpetrators of evil depending on how we are impacted by situational forces. We then want to discover how to limit, constrain, and prevent those situational and systemic forces that propel some of us toward social pathology.

It is equally important for our society to foster the heroic imagination in our citizens by conveying the message that anyone is a hero-in-waiting who will be counted upon to do the right thing when the time comes to make the heroic decision to act to help or to act to prevent harm.

JAMES O'DONNELL
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word

Marx was right: the "state" will evaporate and cease to have useful meaning as a form of human organization

From the earliest Babylonian and Chinese moments of "civilization", we have agreed that human affairs depend on an organizing power in the hands of a few people (usually with religious charisma to undergird their authority) who reside in a functionally central location. "Political science" assumes in its etymology the "polis" or city-state of Greece as the model for community and government.

But it is remarkable how little of human excellence and achievement has ever taken place in capital cities and around those elites, whose cultural history is one of self-mockery and implicit acceptance of the marginalization of the powerful. Borderlands and frontiers (and even suburbs) are where the action is.

But as long as technologies of transportation and military force emphasized geographic centralization and concentration of forces, the general or emperor or president in his capital with armies at his beck and call was the most obvious focus of power. Enlightened government constructed mechanisms to restrain and channel such centralized authority, but did not effectively challenge it.

So what advantage is there today to the nation state? Boundaries between states enshrine and exacerbate inequalities and prevent the free movement of peoples. Large and prosperous state and state-related organizations and locations attract the envy and hostility of others and are sitting duck targets for terrorist action. Technologies of communication and transportation now make geographically-defined communities increasingly irrelevant and provide the new elites and new entrepreneurs with ample opportunity to stand outside them. Economies construct themselves in spite of state management and money flees taxation as relentlessly as water follows gravity.

Who will undergo the greatest destabilization as the state evaporates and its artificial protections and obstacles disappear? The sooner it happens, the more likely it is to be the United States. The longer it takes ... well, perhaps the new Chinese empire isn't quite the landscape-dominating leviathan of the future that it wants to be. Perhaps in the end it will be Mao who was right, and a hundred flowers will bloom there.

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
Professor of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia; Author, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market







The self is a conceptual chimera

Doubt that a supernatural being exists is banal, but the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar," is my candidate for Dangerous Idea. This is, of course, Hume's idea — and Buddha's as well — that the self is an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, that it is not an essential and persistent entity, but rather a conceptual chimera. If this belief ever became widely and viscerally felt throughout a society — whether because of advances in neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophical insights, or whatever — its effects on that society would be incalculable. (Or so this assemblage of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes sometimes thinks.)

CLIFFORD PICKOVER
Author, Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves


We are all virtual

Our desire for entertaining virtual realities is increasing.  As our understanding of the human brain also accelerates, we will create both imagined realities and a set of memories to support these simulacrums.  For example, someday it will be possible to simulate your visit to the Middle Ages and, to make the experience realistic, we may wish to ensure that you believe yourself to actually be in the Middle Ages. False memories may be implanted, temporarily overriding your real memories. This should be easy to do in the future — given that we can already coax the mind to create richly detailed virtual worlds filled with ornate palaces and strange beings through the use of the drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine).  In other words, the brains of people who take DMT appear to access a treasure chest of images and experience that typically include jeweled cities and temples, angelic beings, feline shapes, serpents, and shiny metals. When we understand the brain better, we will be able to safely generate more controlled visions.

Our brains are also capable of simulating complex worlds when we dream.  For example, after I watched a movie about people on a coastal town during the time of the Renaissance, I was “transported” there later that night while in a dream. The mental simulation of the Renaissance did not have to be perfect, and I'm sure that there were myriad flaws.  However, during that dream I believed I was in the Renaissance. 

If we understood the nature of how the mind induces the conviction of reality, even when strange, nonphysical events happen in the dreams, we could use this knowledge to ensure that your simulated trip to the Middle Ages seemed utterly real, even if the simulation was imperfect. It will be easy to create seemingly realistic virtual realities because we don't have to be perfect or even good with respect to the accuracy of our simulations in order to make them seem real.  After all, our nightly dreams usually seem quite real even if upon awakening we realize that logical or structural inconsistencies existed in the dream.

In the future, for each of your own real lives, you will personally create ten simulated lives. Your day job is a computer programmer for IBM. However, after work, you'll be a knight with shining armor in the Middle Ages, attending lavish banquets, and smiling at wandering minstrels and beautiful princesses. The next night, you'll be in the Renaissance, living in your home on the Amalfi coast of Italy, enjoying a dinner of plover, pigeon, and heron.

If this ratio of one real life to ten simulated lives turned out to be representative of human experience, this means that right now, you only have a one in ten chance of being alive on the actual date of today.