# Edge 2001 Full Quotation Curation - Disappeared Questions This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-questions-have-disappeared) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-questions-have-disappeared) - **Archive year:** 2001 - **Response rows represented:** 92 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 92 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 92 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2001B-001 — What is 'vital force'? — Geoffrey E. Hinton > GEOFFREY HINTON, is an AI researcher at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, where he does research on ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception and symbol processing and has over 100 publications in these areas. He was one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm that is now widely used for practical applications. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, and Helmholtz machines. His current main interest is in unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** AI researcher at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [What is 'vital force'?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12063) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-002 — Who does your bleeding? — Tracy Quan > Some skeptics assume that the beauty and spa treatments of today are as ineffective or dangerous as those of the Renaissance period. In fact, there have been inroads. Germ theory helped — as did a host of other developments, including a fascination in the West with things Eastern. The kind of people who would once have gone in for bleeding now go in for things like reflexology and shiatsu. That urge to cleanse and detoxify the body has long been around but we've actually figured out how to do it because we better understand the body. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel. - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Who does your bleeding?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11999) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-003 — A question no longer: what is the Theory of Every Thing? — Philip W. Anderson > I am not arguing that the search for the meaning of those two dozen parameters isn't exciting, interesting, and worthwhile: yes, it's not boring to wonder why the electron is so much lighter than the proton, or why the proton is stable at least for another 35 powers of ten years, or whether quintessence exists. But learning why can have no real effect on our lives, spiritually inspiring as it would indeed be, even to a hardened old atheist like myself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [A question no longer: what is the Theory of Every Thing?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12031) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-004 — Do I have e-mail? — Mark Hurst > MARK HURST, founder of Internet consulting firm Creative Good, is widely credited for popularizing the term "customer experience" and the methodology around it. Hurst has worked since the birth of the Web to make Internet technology easier and more relevant to its "average" users. In 1999, InfoWorld magazine named Hurst "Netrepreneur of the Year", saying that "Mark Hurst has done more than any other individual to make Web-commerce sites easier to use." Over 39,000 people subscribe to his Good Experience newsletter, available for free at goodexperience.com or update@goodexperie nce.com. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of Internet consulting firm Creative Good - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Do I have e-mail?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12074) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-005 — How long before all nations obey the basic principles of the human rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10th, 1948? — Jason Calacanis > Youth inspired by artists created the foundation of Amnesty's success in the '80s, so maybe a vacuum of activist artists is to blame for human rights disappearing from the collective consciousness. Would a homophobic, misogynistic, and violent artist like Eminem ever take a stand for anyone other than himself? Could anyone take him seriously if he did? Britney Spears' fans might not have a problem with her dressing in a thong at the MTV Music Awards but how comfortable would they be if she addressed the issue of the rape, kidnapping, and torture of young women in Sierra Leone? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Internet Entrepreneur; Angel Investor - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [How long before all nations obey the basic principles of the human rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10th, 1948?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12010) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-006 — Is enlightenment a myth or a reality? — John Horgan > Is enlightenment a myth or a reality? I mean the enlightenment of the east, not west, the state of supreme mystical awareness also known as nirvana, satori, cosmic consciousnesss, awakening. Enlightenment is the telos of the great Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and it crops up occasionally in western religions, too, although in a more marginal fashion. Enlightenment once preoccupied such prominent western intellectuals as William James, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell, and there was a surge of scientific interest in mysticism in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Then mysticism became tainted by its association with the human potential and New Age movements and the psychedelic counterculture, and for the last few decades it has for the most part been banished from serious scientific and intellectual discourse. Recently a few scholars have written excellent books that examine mysticism in the light of modern psychology and neuroscience — Zen and the Brain by the neurologist James Austin; Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness by the philosopher Robert Forman; The Mystical Mind by the late psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili and the radiologist Andrew Newberg — but their work has received scant attention in the scientific mainstream. My impression is that many scientists are privately fascinated by mysticism but fear being branded as fuzzy-headed by disclosing their interest. If more scientists revealed their interest in mystical consciousness, perhaps it could become a legitimate subject for investigation once again. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 230 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Is enlightenment a myth or a reality?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12042) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-007 — Don't reckon that I know — John Allen Paulos > JOHN ALLEN PAULOS, bestselling author, mathematician, and public speaker is professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia. In addition to being the author of a number of scholarly papers on mathematical logic, probability, and the philosophy of science, Dr. Paulos books include Innumeracy - Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, and Once Upon a Number. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Don't reckon that I know](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12053) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-008 — questions that were asked in extinct languages — David Haig > DAVID HAIG is an evolutionary geneticist/theorist at Harvard who is interested in conflicts and conflict resolution with the genome, with a particular interest in genomic imprinting and relations between parents and offspring. Hiscurrent interests include the evolution of linkage groups and the evolution of viviparity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** George Putnam Professor of Biology, Harvard University; Author, From Darwin to Derrida - **Extract length:** 45 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [questions that were asked in extinct languages](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11989) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-009 — Why are humans smarter than other animals? — Alun Anderson > Artificial intelligence researchers came along later but they too could not easily part from medieval thinking. The most important problems to tackle were agreed to be those that represented our "highest" abilities. Solve them and everything else would be easy. As a result, we have ended up with computer programs that can play chess as well as a grandmaster. But unfortunately we have none that can make a robot walk as well as a 2-year old, yet alone run like a cat. The really hard problems turn out to be those that we share with "lower" animals. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Why are humans smarter than other animals?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12021) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-010 — Are there planets around other stars? — Tom Standage > The discovery that there are other planets out there has not, however, caused as much of a fuss as might have been expected, for two reasons. First, decades of Star Trek and its ilk meant that the existence of other worlds was assumed; the discovery has merely confirmed what has lately become a widely-held belief. And second, none of these new planets has actually been seen. Instead, their existence has been inferred through the tiny wobbles that they cause in the motion of their parent stars. The first picture of an extrasolar planet is, however, probably just a few years away. Like the first picture of Earth from space, it is likely to become an iconic image that once again redefines the way we as humans think about our place in the universe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Business Affairs Editor, The Economist; Author, The Edible History of the Humanity - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Are there planets around other stars?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12064) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-011 — Do computers think? — Rafael Núñez > RAFAEL E. NÚÑEZ, currently at the Department of Psychology of the University of Freiburg, is a research associate of the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked for more than a decade on the foundations of embodied cognition, with special research into the nature and origin of mathematical concepts. He has published in several languages in a variety of areas, and has taught in leading academic institutions in Europe, the United States, and South America. He is the author (with George Lakoff) of Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being; and co-editor (with Walter Freeman) of Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention, and Emotion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Do computers think?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12000) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-012 — a set of questions that ought to have disappeared; questions that seek reasons for patterns that in reality are due to chance — Nicholas Humphrey > NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, and the author ofConsciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 45 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [a set of questions that ought to have disappeared; questions that seek reasons for patterns that in reality are due to chance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12032) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-013 — How do our brains become who we are? — Joseph LeDoux > Many neuroscientists, myself included, went into brain research because of an interest in the fact that our brains make us who we are. But the topics we end up working on are typically more mundane. It's much easier to research the neural basis of perception, memory or emotion than the way perceptual, memory, and emotion systems are integrated in the process of encoding who we are. Questions about the neural basis of personhood, the self, have never been at the forefront of brain science, and so are not, strictly speaking, lost questions to the field. But they are lost questions for those of us who were drawn to neuroscience by an interest in them, and then settle for less when overcome with frustration over the magnitude of the problem relative to the means we have for solving it. But questions about the self and the brain may not be as hard to address as they seem. A simple shift in emphasis from issues about the way the brain typically works in all of us to the way it works in individuals would be an important entry point. This would then necessitate that research on cognitive processes, like perception or memory, take subjects' motivations and emotions into consideration, rather than doing everything possible to eliminate them. Eventually, researchers would study perception, memory, or emotion less as isolated brain functions than as activities that, when integrated, contribute to the real function of the brain-- the creation and maintenance of the self. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious - **Extract length:** 249 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [How do our brains become who we are?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12075) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-014 — Is human nature innately good or evil? — Ann Crittenden > Another question that has fallen into the dustbin of history is this: Is human nature innately good or evil? This became a gripping topic in the late 17th century, as Enlightment thinkers began to challenge the Christian assumption that man was born a fallen creature. It was a great debate while it lasted: original sin vs. tabla rasa and the perfectability of man; Edmund Burke vs. Tom Paine; Dostoyevsky vs. the Russian reformers. But Darwin and Freud undermined the foundations of both sides, by discrediting the very possibility of discussing human nature in moral or teleological terms. Now the debate has been recast as "nature vs. nurture" and in secular scientific circles at least, man is the higher primate -- a beast with distinctly mixed potential. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Lecturer; Author, If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Is human nature innately good or evil?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12011) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-015 — Is the Central Dogma of biology inviolate? — Robert Aunger > In 1957, a few years after he co-discovered the double helix, Francis Crick proposed a very famous hypothesis. It states that "once 'information' has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible." After it had proven to form the foundation of molecular biology, he later called this hypothesis the "Central Dogma" of biology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist; Author, Gaining Control - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Is the Central Dogma of biology inviolate?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12043) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-016 — How can I stop the soul of the deceased reanimating the body? — Timothy Taylor > At a particular point (yet to be clearly defined) in human cultural evolution, a specific idea took hold that there were two, partially separable, elements present in a living creature: the material body and the force that animated it. On the death of the body the animating force would, naturally, desire the continuation of this-worldly action and struggle to reassert itself (just as one might strive to retrieve a flint axe one had accidentally dropped). If the soul (or spirit) succeeded, it would also seek to repossess its property, including its spouse, and reassert its material appetites. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How can I stop the soul of the deceased reanimating the body?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12054) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-017 — the old Platonic questions about the nature of the good and the form of beauty — James J. O'Donnell > JAMES J. O'DONNELL, Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 32 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [the old Platonic questions about the nature of the good and the form of beauty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11990) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-018 — When will overpopulation create worldwide starvation? — Denis Dutton > Ideas can become so embedded in our outlook that they are hard to shake by rational argument. As a Peace Corps Volunteer working in rural India in the 1960s, I vividly remember being faced with multiple uncertainties about what might work for the modernization of India. There was only one thing I and my fellow development workers could all agree on: India unquestionably would experience mass famine by the 1980s at the latest. For us at the time this notion was an eschatological inevitability and an article of faith. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily; Author, The Art Instinct - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [When will overpopulation create worldwide starvation?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12022) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-019 — Does God Exist? — Lawrence M. Krauss > LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS is Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University. He is the recipient of the AAAS Award for Public Understanding of Science, and this year's Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society. He is the author of numerous books, including The Physics of Star Trek. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Does God Exist?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12065) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-020 — Looking at the world upside down: what are we enhancing or what is vanishing in our brains while flat and dormant views of the universe are slowly disappearing? — Eduardo Punset > Professor Beckman in Wursburg University (Germany) has convinced at last his fellow psychiatrists that neuron's mistakes in their migration from the limbic to the upper layers of the brain of the unborn are responsible, to a very large extent, for the 1% of epileptics and schizophrenics in the world's population. By the way, the 1% is fixed, no matter how many neuroscientists join the battle against mental illness. It is like a sort of cosmic radiation background. The only exception that shows up is whenever deep malnutrition or feverish influenza in expectant mothers pushes the rate significantly up. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Spanish Television Presenter; Author, The Happiness Trip - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Looking at the world upside down: what are we enhancing or what is vanishing in our brains while flat and dormant views of the universe are slowly disappearing?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12001) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-021 — Obsolete and Inappropriate Metaphors — Robert Provine > My response to the inquiry about questions that are no longer asked is to reframe it and suggest instead a common class of missing questions, those associated with obsolete and inappropriate metaphors. Metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool, which, like all models, clarifies thinking when appropriate, but constrains it when inappropriate. Science is full of them. My professional specialties of neuroscience and biopsychology has mind/brain metaphors ranging from Locke's ancient blank slate (tabula rasa), to the more technologically advanced switchboard, and the metaphor de jour, the computer. None do justice to the brain as a soggy lump of wetware, but linger as cognitive/linguistic models. Natural selection in the realm of metaphors is slow and imperfect. Witness the reference to DNA as a "blueprint" for an organism, when Dawkins' "recipe" metaphor more accurately reflects DNA's incoding of instructions for organismic assembly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 140 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Obsolete and Inappropriate Metaphors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12033) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-022 — What is the difference between men and pigs? — Kai Krause > There is in fact an almost universal algorithm, like cats stalking their prey, to makes sense of our nature by boundary conditions, alas compiled with spotty statistics and messy heuristics, gullible souls, political machinations, cheats, lies and video tape, in short: human nature. We search and probe, the literate digerati confer virtually, each wondering about the other, each looking at their unique sets of parents, and the impossibility to imagine them in the act of procreation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [What is the difference between men and pigs?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12076) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-023 — Is nothing sacred? — Douglas Rushkoff > A politician’s claim to be "God-fearing" is meant to signify that he has priorities greater than short-term political gain. What most people don’t realize is that, in the Bible anyway, God-fearing is a distant second to God-loving. People who were God-fearing only behaved ethically because they were afraid of the Hebrew God’s wrath. This wasn’t a sacred relationship at all, but the self-interested avoidance of retaliation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Is nothing sacred?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12012) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-024 — How fast is the Earth moving? — Paul Davies > A hundred years ago, one of the most fundamental questions in physical science was: How fast is the Earth moving? Many experiments had been performed to measure the speed of the Earth through space as it orbits the sun, and as the solar system orbits the galaxy. The most famous was conducted in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley using an optical interferometer. The result they obtained was... zero. Today, scientists regard the question of the Earth's speed through space as meaningless and misconceived, although many non-scientists still refer to the concept. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How fast is the Earth moving?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12044) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-025 — The definition of life and consciousness? — Stanislas Dehaene > Any biological theory of consciousness, which assumes that consciousness has evolved, implies that "having consciousness" is not an all-or-none property. The biological substrates of consciousness in human adults are probably also present, but only in partial form, in other species, in young children or brain-lesioned patients. It is therefore a partially arbitrary question whether we want to extend the use of the term "consciousness" to them. For instance, several mammals, and even very young human children, show intentional behavior, partially reportable mental states, some working memory ability — but perhaps no theory of mind, and more "encapsulated" mental processes that cannot be reported verbally or even non-verbally. Do they have consciousness, then? My bet is that once a detailed cognitive and neural theory of the various aspects of consciousness is available, the vacuity of this question will become obvious. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 139 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The definition of life and consciousness?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12055) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-026 — Can machines think? — Pamela McCorduck > The central issue is the social, not scientific, definition of "thinking". A generation of Western intellectuals who took their identity mainly from their intelligence has grown too old to ask the question with any conviction, and anyway, machines are all around them thinking up a storm. Machines don't yet think like Einstein, but then neither do most people, and we don't question their humanity on that account. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Machines Who Think, The Universal Machine, Bounded Rationality, This Could Be Important; Co-author (with Edward Feigenbaum), The Fifth Generation - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Can machines think?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11991) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-027 — What do women want? — Sylvia Paull > People in the Western world assume women have it all: education, job opportunities, birth control, love control, and financial freedom. But women still lack the essential freedom — equality — they lacked a century ago. Women are minorities in every sector of our government and economy, and women are still expected to raise families while at the same time earning incomes that are comparably lower than what males earn. And in our culture, women are still depicted as whores, bimbos, or bloodsuckers by advertisers to sell everything from computers to cars. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** founder of Gracenet - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What do women want?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12023) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-028 — Have We Seen the End of Science? Will the Internet Stock Bubble Burst? — Joseph Traub > JOSEPH F. TRAUB is the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was founding Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 1979 to 1989, and founding chair of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences from 1986 to 1992. From 1971 to 1979 he was Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University. Traub is the founding editor of the Journal of Complexity and an associate editor of Complexity. A Festschrift in celebration of his sixtieth birthday was recently published. He is the author of nine books including the recently published Complexity and Information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University; coauthor, Complexity and Information - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Have We Seen the End of Science? Will the Internet Stock Bubble Burst?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12066) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-029 — What can government do to help create a better sort of human? — Joel Garreau > JOEL GARREAU, the cultural revolution correspondent of The Washington Post, is a student of global culture, values, and change whose current interests range from human networks and the transmission of ideas to the hypothesis that the '90s — like the '50s — set the stage for a social revolution to come. He is the author of the best-selling books Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of North America, and a principal of The Edge City Group, which is dedicated to the creation of more liveable and profitable urban areas worldwide. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal, The Garreau Group - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What can government do to help create a better sort of human?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12002) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-030 — Why is life so full of suffering? — Randolph Nesse > One of life's most profound questions has been thought to be unanswerable. That question is, "Why is life so full of suffering?" Impatience with centuries of theological and philosophical speculation has led many to give up on the big question, and to ask instead only how brain mechanisms work, and why people differ in their experiences of suffering. But the larger question has an answer, an evolutionary answer. The capacities for suffering — pain, hunger, cough, anxiety, sadness, boredom and all the res — have been shaped by natural selection. They seem to be problems because they are so painful and because they are aroused only in adverse circumstances, but they are, in fact, solutions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why is life so full of suffering?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12034) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-031 — Where has Darwin gone? — Milford H. Wolpoff > Human evolution is now commonly depicted as the consequence of species replacements, where there are a series of species emanating from different, but usually African homelands, each sooner or later replacing the earlier ones. It is not the selection process that provides the source of human superiority in each successive replacement, but the random accidents that take place when new species are formed from small populations of old ones. The process is seen as being driven by random extinctions, opening up unexpected opportunities for those fortunate new species lucky to be at the right time and place. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Where has Darwin gone?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12077) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-032 — None — Henry Warwick > 3. It's important to not let questions disappear. By doubting the obvious, examining the the same ground with fresh ideas, and questioning recieved ideas, great strides in the collected knowledge of this human project can be (and historically, have been) gained. When we consign a question to the scrap heap of history we run many risks — risks of blind arrogance, deaf self righteousness, and finally choking on the bland pablum of unquestioned dogma. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** artist, composer, and scientist - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [None](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12013) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-033 — Professor of Law at Temple University — David Post > Perhaps another question dear to Jefferson's heart has also disappeared: from what source do governments get their legitimate power? In 1780, this was a real question, concerning which reasonable people gave different answers: 'God,' or 'the divine right of Kings,' or 'heredity,' or 'the need to protect its citizens.' By declaring as 'self evident' the 'truth' that 'governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed,' Jefferson was trying to declare that this question had, in fact, disappeared. I think he may have been right. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Law at Temple University - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Professor of Law at Temple University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12045) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-034 — Does God play dice? — Leon M. Lederman > Like mathematics whose symbols can represent physical properties when applied to some scientific problem, God is a convenient symbol for nature, for the way the world works. Einstein's reaction of utter incredibility to the quantum theory from its development in the late 20's until his death in 1955, was echoed by colleagues who had participated in the early creation of the quantum revolution, which Richard Feynman had termed the most radical theory ever. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Does God play dice?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12056) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-035 — Do animals have thoughts? — Unattributed Edge contributor > MARC D. HAUSER is an evolutionary psychologist, and a professor at Harvard University where he is a fellow of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is a professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychology, as well as the Program in Neurosciences. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, and Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Do animals have thoughts?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11992) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-036 — What are the implications of human nature for political systems? This question was openly discussed in two historical periods. — Steven Pinker > The first was the Enlightenment. Hobbes claimed the brutishishness of man in a state of nature called for a governmental Leviathan. Rousseau's concept of the noble savage led him to call for the abolition of property and the predominance of the "general will." Adam Smith justified market capitalism by saying that it is not the generosity but the self-interest of the baker that leads him to give us bread. Madison justified constitutional government by saying that if people were angels, no government would be necessary, and if angels were to govern people, no controls on government would be necessary. The young Marx's notion of a "species character" for creativity and self-expression led to "From each according to his ability"; his later belief that human nature is transformed throughout history justified revolutionary social change. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What are the implications of human nature for political systems? This question was openly discussed in two historical periods.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12024) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-037 — Should the right to own property be preserved? — Jordan Pollack > JORDAN POLLACK, a computer science and complex systems professor at Brandeis, works on AI, Artificial Life, Neural Networks, Evolution, Dynamical Systems, Games, Robotics, Machine Learning, and Educational Technology. He is a prolific inventor, advises several startup companies and incubators, and in his spare time runs Thinmail, a service designed to enhance the usefulness of wireless email. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Should the right to own property be preserved?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12067) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-038 — the narrative shifted and ...the female sense of identity in the West, for the first time ever, no longer hinges on the identity of her mate — Unattributed Edge contributor > The question disappeared in most of Europe and North America, of course, because of the great movement toward women's employment and career advancement even after marrying and bearing children. Feminist historians have long documented how the "story" of the female heroine used to end with marriage; indeed, this story was so set in stone as late as the 1950's and early 60's in this country that Sylvia Plath's heroine in The Bell Jar had to flirt with suicide in order to try to find a way out of it. Betty Friedan noted in The Feminine Mystique that women (meaning middle class white women; the narrative was always different for women of color and working class women) couldn't "think their way past" marriage and family in terms of imagining a future that had greater dimension. But the narrative shifted and it's safe to say that the female sense of identity in the West, for the first time ever, no longer hinges on the identity of her mate — which is a truly new story in terms of our larger history. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 179 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [the narrative shifted and ...the female sense of identity in the West, for the first time ever, no longer hinges on the identity of her mate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12003) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-039 — Do genes influence human behavior? — Judith Rich Harris > Around the middle of the 20th century, it became politically incorrect and academically unpopular to use the word "heredity"; if the topic came up at all, a euphemism, "nature," was used in its place. The fact that the pauper and the prince had been reared in very different circumstances now came to the fore, and the behavioral differences between them was now attributed entirely to the differences in their experiences. The observation that the prince had many of the same quirks as the king was now blamed entirely on his upbringing. Unfortunately, this answer, too, was based on erroneous reasoning about ambiguous evidence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Do genes influence human behavior?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12035) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-040 — Why is our sense of beauty and elegance such a useful tool for discriminating between a good theory and a bad theory? — Al Seckel > AL SECKEL is acknowledged as one of the world's leading authorities on illusions. He has given invited lectures on illusions at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Oxford University, University of Cambridge, UCLA, UCSD, University of Lund, University of Utrecht, and many other fine institutions. Seckel is currently under contract with the Brain and Cognitive Division of the MIT Press to author a comprehensive treatise on illusions, perception, and cognitive science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive neuroscientist; Author, Optical Illusions: The Science of Visual Perception - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why is our sense of beauty and elegance such a useful tool for discriminating between a good theory and a bad theory?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12078) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-041 — Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing? — Andy Clark > ANDY CLARK is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, UK. He was previously Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing, Associative Engines, and Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 54 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12014) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-042 — Do Men and Women Differ Psychologically — David M. Buss > DAVID M. BUSS is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of several books, most recently The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind , and The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 49 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Do Men and Women Differ Psychologically](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12046) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-043 — What's your business model? — Dave Winer > Now that the dotcom crash seems permanent, entrepreneurs are looking for real ways to make money. No more vacuous "business models." VCs are hunkering down for a long haul. The average IQ of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is zooming to its former stratospheric levels. There's a genuine excitement here now, but if you ask what the business model is you're going to get a boring answer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Blogging and RSS Software Pioneer; Editor, Scripting News Weblog - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [What's your business model?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12057) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-044 — How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. — Geoffrey Miller > To our "Sex and the City" generation, these three questions sound shamefully Victorian and bourgeois. Yet they were not unique to 19th century England: they obsessed the families of eligible young men and women in every agricultural and industrial civilization. Only with our socially-atomized, late-capitalist society have these questions become tasteless, if not taboo. Worried parents ask them only in the privacy of their own consciences, in the sleepless nights before a son or daughter's ill-considered marriage. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11993) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-045 — The Great Idea That's Disappeared — Colin Tudge > The greatest idea that's disappeared from mainstream science this past 400 years is surely that of God. The greats who laid the foundations of modern science in the 17th century (Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Descartes) and the significant-but-not-quite-so-greats (Robert Boyle, John Ray, etc.) were theologians as much as they were scientists and philosophers. They wanted to know how things are, of course — but also what God had in mind when he made them this way. They took it for granted, or contrived to prove to their own satisfaction, that unless there is a God, omniscient and mindful, then there could be no Universe at all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Author, Six Steps Back to the Land - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Great Idea That's Disappeared](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12025) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-046 — How many angels can dance on the point of a pin? — Karl Sabbagh > There's a good example of how this works currently with the interest taken in St John's wort as a possible treatment for depression. Once there was enough consistent evidence to suggest that there might be an effect, clinical trials were planned and are now under way. Interestingly, an indication that there might be a genuine effect comes from a substantial body of information suggesting that there are adverse drug interactions between St John's wort and immunosuppressive drugs taken by transplant patients. Once an 'alternative' remedy actually causes harm as well as having alleged benefits, it's claimed effects are more likely to be genuine. One argument against most of the quack remedies around, such as homoeopathy, is that they are entirely safe (although this is seen as a recommendation, by the gullible.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12068) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-047 — What will life be like after the revolution? — Jay Ogilvy > Perhaps it's a result of a century of disappointments: from the revolution of 1917 to Stalin and the fall of communism; from the Spanish Civil War to Franco; from Mao's long march to Deng's proclamation that to get rich is glorious. Perhaps it's a result of political history. But there was more that had to do with psychological transformation. Remember Norman O. Brown's essay, "The place of apocalypse in the life of the mind"? Remember R. D. Laing's turn on breakdown as breakthrough? Remember the fascination with words like 'metamorphosis' and 'metanoia'? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** a cofounder of GBN, a Partner in the Monitor Group of Companies - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [What will life be like after the revolution?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12004) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-048 — A question no longer: what is the Theory of Every Thing? — Philip W. Anderson > I am not arguing that the search for the meaning of those two dozen parameters isn't exciting, interesting, and worthwhile: yes, it's not boring to wonder why the electron is so much lighter than the proton, or why the proton is stable at least for another 35 powers of ten years, or whether quintessence exists. But learning why can have no real effect on our lives, spiritually inspiring as it would indeed be, even to a hardened old atheist like myself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [A question no longer: what is the Theory of Every Thing?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12036) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-049 — Did Noah Really Collect all Species of Earthly Organism on his Ark? — Clifford Pickover > Various authors have noted that if, in forty days and nights the highest mountains on Earth were covered, the required incredible rate of rain fall of fifteen feet per hour would sink the ark. All of these cogitations lead me to believe that most scientifically trained people no longer ask whether an actual man named Noah collected all species of Earthly organism on his ark. By extension, most scientifically trained people no longer ask if the Bible is literal truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Did Noah Really Collect all Species of Earthly Organism on his Ark?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12079) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-050 — What is Reality? — Piet Hut > To look at the world in wonder, and to stay with that sense of wonder without jumping straight past it, has become almost impossible for someone taking science seriously. The three dominant reactions are: to see science as the only way to get at the truth, at what is really real; to accept science but to postulate a more encompassing reality around or next to it, based on an existing religion; or to accept science as one useful approach in a plurality of many approaches, neither of which has anything to say about reality in any ultimate way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What is Reality?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12015) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-051 — Does money buy happiness? — David G. Myers > Three in four entering collegians today deem it "very important" or "essential" that they become "very well-off financially." Most adults believe "more money" would boost their quality of life. And today's "luxury fever" suggests that affluent Americans and Europeans are putting their money where their hearts are. "Whoever said money can't buy happiness isn't spending it right," proclaimed a Lexus ad. But the facts of life have revealed otherwise. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Does money buy happiness?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12047) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-052 — Where is the Great American Novel? — Daniel McNeill > Well, the idea itself was never a very good one. It had breathtakingly hazy contours. It ignored the work of authors like Melville, Hawthorne, Wharton, and Twain. And it seemed to assume that a single novel could sum up this vast and complex nation. I'd like to think its disappearance reflects these problems. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** author of The Face, and principal author of the best-selling Fuzzy Logic - **Extract length:** 53 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Where is the Great American Novel?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12058) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-053 — None — Christopher Phillips > Or at least, certainly not the ones that have so far been submitted to this list, since the questions posted are proof positive that they have not disappeared at all, or at least, not altogether. Sure, some questions have their heyday for a while, and then they may disappear for many a moon. But the great question you posed -- what questions have disappeared? -- shows that they were just waiting for a question like this for someone to be reminded just how much emptier our existence would be without certain questions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Socrates Cafe - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [None](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11994) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-054 — Where Was Lost Atlantis? — Eberhard Zangger > During the 20th century, dozens of palaces dating to a golden age a thousand years older than Plato's Athens have been excavated around the eastern Mediterranean. Atlantis can now be placed in a historical context. It is an Egyptian recollection of Bronze Age Troy and its awe-inspiring war against the Greek kingdoms. Plato's account and the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC can now be seen in a new light. Why was this connection not made earlier? Four Egyptian words, describing location and size, were mistranslated, because at the time Egypt and Greece used different calendars and scales. And, in contrast to biology, where, after Darwin, the idea of creationism was dropped in favor of evolutionism, Aegean prehistory has never questioned its basic premises. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing director of science communications - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Where Was Lost Atlantis?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12026) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-055 — What is the nature of our creator? — Kevin Kelly > KEVIN KELLY is a founding editor of Wired magazine. In 1993 and 1996, under his co-authorship, Wired won it's industry's Oscar — The National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Prior to the launch of Wired , Kelly was editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical and cultural news. He is the author of New Rules for the New Economy; andOut of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What is the nature of our creator?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12069) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-056 — monograph Goedel's theorem — Verena Huber-Dyson > What about the question as to the nature of infinitesimal's, a question that has plagued us ever since Leibniz. Euler and his colleagues had used them with remarkable success boldly following their intuition. But in the 18th Century mathematicians became self conscious. By the time we were teaching our calculus classes by means of epsilon's, delta's and Dedekind cuts some of us might have thought that Cauchy, Weierstrass and Dedekind had chased the question away. But then along came logicians like Abraham Robinson with a new take on it with so-called non standard quantities ‹ another favorite of the popular science press. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** 1923-2016; Emeritus Professor, Formerly, Philosophy Department. University of Calgary, Alberta Canada - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [monograph Goedel's theorem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12005) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-057 — Are women and men equal? — Dan Sperber > No doubt, there are differences between women and men, some obvious and others more contentious. But arguments for inequality of worth or rights between the sexes have wholly lost intellectual respectability. Why? Because they were grounded in biologically evolved dispositions and culturally transmitted prejudices that, however strongly entrenched, could not withstand the kind of rational scrutiny to which they have been submitted in the past two centuries. Also because, more recently, the Feminist movement has given so many of us the motivation and the means to look into ourselves and recognize and fight lingering biases. Still, the battle against sexism is not over — and it may never be. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Are women and men equal?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12037) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-058 — Where did the moon go? — William H. Calvin > When, every few years, you see a bite taken out of the sun or moon, you ought to remember just how frightening that question used to be. It became clockwork when the right viewpoint was eventually discovered by science (imagining yourself high above the north pole, looking at the shadows cast by the earth and the moon). But there was an intermediate stage of empirical knowledge, when the shaman discovered that the sixth full moon after a prior eclipse had a two-third's chance of being associated with another eclipse. And so when the shaman told people to pray hard the night before, he was soon seen as being on speaking terms with whomever ran the heavens. This helped convert part-time shamen into full-time priests, supported by the community. This can be seen as the entry-level job for philosophers and scientists, who prize the discoveries they can pass on to the next generation, allowing us to see farther, always opening up new questions while retiring old ones. It's like climbing a mountain that keeps providing an even better viewpoint. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 178 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Where did the moon go?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12048) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-059 — Has History Ended? — Howard Gardner > At the start of 2001, we are no longer asking "Has History Ended?" History seems all too alive. The events of Seattle challenged the globalization behemoth; the world is no longer beating a path to internet startups; Communist and fascist revivals have emerged in several countries; the historical legacies in areas like the Balkans and the Middle East are as vivid as ever; and, as I noted in response to last year's question, much of Africa is at war. As if to remind us of our naivete, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein have been in "office" as long as most Americans can remember. If George II is ignorant of this history, he is likely to see it repeated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Has History Ended?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12016) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-060 — Who should make the truly global decisions, and how? — Izumi Aizu > Despite the growing digital divide, the number of people who use the Net is still exploding, even in the developing side of the world. What is fair, what is democratic, what kind of principles can we all agree on this single global complex system, from all corners of the world is my question of the year to come. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Executive Director, Institute for HyperNetwork Society; Senior Research Fellow & Professor, Institute for InfoSocinomics, Tama University, Japan - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Who should make the truly global decisions, and how?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12059) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-061 — When will we face another energy crisis, and how will we cope with it? — Kenneth W. Ford > Science will provide no miracles (as the Wall Street Journal, in its justification of inaction, would have us believe), but science can do a lot to ameliorate the dislocations that this century will bring. We need to encourage our public figures to lift their eyes beyond the two-, four-, and six-year time horizons of their jobs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Retired Director of the American Institute of Physics - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [When will we face another energy crisis, and how will we cope with it?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11995) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-062 — Where Does Love Come From? — Brian Goodwin > What does science have to say about the origins of love in the scheme of things? Not a lot. In fact, it is still virtually a taboo subject, just as consciousness was until very recently. However, since feelings are a major component of consciousness, it seems likely that the ontology of love is now likely to emerge as a significant question in science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Where Does Love Come From?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12027) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-063 — How should adult education work? How do we educate the masses? — David Gelernter > How should adult education work? How do we educate the masses? (That's right, The Masses.) How do we widen the circle of people who love and support great art, great music, great literature? How do we widen the circle of adults who understand the science and engineering that our modern world is built on? How do we rear good American citizens? Or for that matter good German citizens, or Israeli or Danish or Chilean? And if this is the information age, why does the population at large grow worse-informed every year? (Sorry — that last one isn't a question people have stopped asking; they never started.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats) - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How should adult education work? How do we educate the masses?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12070) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-064 — Is God Dead? — Terrence J. Sejnowski > TERRENCE J. SEJNOWSKI, a pioneer in Computational Neurobiology, is regarded by many as one of the world's most foremost theoretical brain scientists. In 1988, he moved from Johns Hopkins University to the Salk Institute, where he is a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. In addition to co-authoring The Computational Brain,he has published over 250 scientific articles. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Is God Dead?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12006) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-065 — Can science answer moral and ethical questions? — Michael Shermer > From the time of the Enlightenment philosophers have speculated that the remarkable advances of science would one day spill over into the realm of moral philosophy, and that scientists would be able to discover answers to previously insoluble moral dilemmas and ethical conundrums. One of the reasons Ed Wilson's book Consilience was so successful was that he attempted to revive this Enlightenment dream. Alas, we seem no closer than we were when Voltaire, Diderot, and company first encouraged scientists to go after moral and ethical questions. Are such matters truly insoluble and thus out of the realm of science (since, as Peter Medewar noted, "science is the art of the soluble")? Should we abandon Ed Wilson's Enlightenment dream of applying evolutionary biology to the moral realm? Most scientists agree that moral questions are scientifically insoluble and they have abandoned the Enlightenment dream. But not all. We shall see. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 148 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Can science answer moral and ethical questions?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12038) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-066 — Why can't we use technology to solve social problems? — Howard Rheingold > 4. There is no market for solving social problems, and it isn't the business of government to get into the technology or any other kind of business. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle. Some technologies such as the digital computer and the Internet were jump-started by governments, evolved through grassroots enthusiasms, and later become industries and "new economies." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Why can't we use technology to solve social problems?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12049) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-067 — How does [fill in the blank] in human affairs relate to the great central theory? — David Berreby > One, some new Great Central Theory slouches in; some of the Darwinians think they've got the candidate, and they certainly evince signs of quasi-religious commitment. (For example, as a Freudian would say you doubted Freud because of your neuroses, I have heard Darwinians say I doubted their theories because of an evolved predisposition not to believe the truth. I call this quasi-religious because this move makes the theory impregnable to evidence or new ideas.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How does [fill in the blank] in human affairs relate to the great central theory?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12017) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-068 — How does a slide rule work? — John D. Barrow > My vanished question is:"'How does a slide rule work?"' Slide rules were once ubiquitous in labs, classrooms, and the pockets of engineers. They are now as common as dinosaurs; totally replaced by electronic calulators and computers. The interesting question to ponder is: what is it that in the future will do to computers what computers did to slide rules? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Physicist; Professor of Mathematical Science, Director, Millennium Mathematics Project, University of Cambridge; Author, The Book of Universes - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How does a slide rule work?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12060) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-069 — Will the free market finally triumph? — Stephen Schneider > Economists refer to the units of value in cost-benefit analyses as "numeraires" — dollars per ton carbon emitted in the climate example, is the numeraire of choice for "free market" advocates. But what of lives lost per ton of emissions from intensified hurricanes, or species driven off mountain tops to extinction per ton, or heritage sites lost per ton?? Or what if global GDP indeed goes up fastest by free markets but 25% of the world gets left further behind as globally economically efficient markets expand? Is equity a legitimate numeraire too? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Will the free market finally triumph?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11996) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-070 — Obsolete and Inappropriate Metaphors — Robert Provine > My response to the inquiry about questions that are no longer asked is to reframe it and suggest instead a common class of missing questions, those associated with obsolete and inappropriate metaphors. Metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool, which, like all models, clarifies thinking when appropriate, but constrains it when inappropriate. Science is full of them. My professional specialties of neuroscience and biopsychology has mind/brain metaphors ranging from Locke's ancient blank slate (tabula rasa), to the more technologically advanced switchboard, and the metaphor de jour, the computer. None do justice to the brain as a soggy lump of wetware, but linger as cognitive/linguistic models. Natural selection in the realm of metaphors is slow and imperfect. Witness the reference to DNA as a "blueprint" for an organism, when Dawkins' "recipe" metaphor more accurately reflects DNA's incoding of instructions for organismic assembly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 140 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Obsolete and Inappropriate Metaphors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12028) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-071 — How will Americans handle a surplus of leisure? — Stewart Brand > STEWART BRAND is founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation. He is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, author ofThe Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT , How Buildings Learn, and The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (MasterMinds Series). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How will Americans handle a surplus of leisure?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12071) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-072 — Do we survive death? — Susan Blackmore > I suggest that no one asks the question any more because the answer seems too obvious. To most scientists it is obviously "No", while to most New Agers and religious people it is obviously "Yes". But perhaps we should. The answer may be obvious (it's "No" — I'm an unreligious scientist) but its implications for living our lives and dealing compassionately with other people are profound. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Do we survive death?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12007) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-073 — What is the next step in the evolution of democracy? — Lee Smolin > A question no longer being asked is how to make the next step in the evolution of a democratic society. Until very recently it was widely understood that democracy was a project with many steps, whose goal was the eventual construction of a perfectly just and egalitarian society. But recently, with the well deserved collapse of Marxism, it has begun to seem that the highest stage of civilization we humans can aspire to is global capitalism leavened by some version of a bureaucratic welfare state, all governed badly by an unwieldy and corrupt representative democracy. This is better than many of the alternatives, but it is hardly egalitarian and often unjust; those of us who care about these values must hope that human ingenuity is up to the task of inventing something still better. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What is the next step in the evolution of democracy?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12039) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-074 — The questions that have disappeared are eschatological — Thomas A. Bass > The twentieth century will be remembered as one of the most violent in history. There were two world wars, numerous genocides, and millions of murders conducted in the name of progress. Driving this violence was the urge to find truth or purity. The violence was lit by the refining fire of belief. The redemptive ideal was called national socialism, communism, stalinism, maoism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of English and Journalism, State University of New York, Albany; Author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved US - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The questions that have disappeared are eschatological](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12050) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-075 — As William Blake might have written to a coelacanth: Did he who made the haplochromids make thee? — Richard Dawkins > The three meanings are too disparate to bring together easily, but I'll try. The popular question 'Has there been enough time for evolution to take place?' can now confidently be answered in the affirmative. It should never have been put in the first place since, self-evidently, we are here. But what is more interesting is that the real question that faces us is almost the exact opposite. Why is evolution so slow, given that natural selection is so powerful? Far from there being too little time for evolution to play with, there seems to be too much. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [As William Blake might have written to a coelacanth: Did he who made the haplochromids make thee?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12018) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-076 — the old question of whether our categories of reality are discovered or constructed — Margaret Wertheim > MARGARET WERTHEIM is the author of Pythagoras Trousers, a history of the relationship between physics and religion; and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. She is a research associate to the American Museum of Natural History in NY and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She is currently working on a documentary about "outsider physics." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science writer and commentator - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [the old question of whether our categories of reality are discovered or constructed](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12061) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-077 — Are subordinate clauses more typical of languages with a long literary tradition than integral features of human speech? — John McWhorter > Contemporary linguists tend to assume in their work that subordinate clauses, such as "The boy that I saw yesterday" or "I knew what happened when she came down the steps", are an integral part of the innate linguistic endowment, and/or central features of "human speech" writ large. Most laymen would assume the same thing. However, the fact is that when we analyze a great many strictly spoken languages with no written tradition, subordinate clauses are rare to nonexistent. In many Native American languages, for example, the only way to express something like the men who were members is a clause which parses approximately as "The 'membering' men"; the facts are similar in thousands of other languages largely used orally. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Are subordinate clauses more typical of languages with a long literary tradition than integral features of human speech?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11997) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-078 — Was Einstein Right? — Martin Rees > New and different experiments are nonetheless currently being planned. But the expectation that they'll corroborate the theory is no so strong that we'd demand a high burden of proof before accepting a contrary result, For instance, NASA plans to launch an ultra-precise gyroscope ("Gravity Probe B") to measure tiny precession effects. If the results confirm Einstein, nobody will be surprised nor excited — though they would have been if the experiment had flown 30 years ago, when it was first devised. On the other hand, if this very technically-challenging experiment revealed seeming discrepancies, I suspect that most scientists would suspend judgment until it had been corroborated. So the most exciting result of Gravity Probe B would be a request to NASA for another vast sum, in order repeat it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Was Einstein Right?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12029) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-079 — Who are we? — Tor Nørretranders > New phenomena like information processing artifacts, computational life forms, bioengineered humans, upgraded animals and pen-pals in space will force us to consider ourselves and our situation: Why didn't we finish hunger on this planet? Are we evil or just idiots? Why do we really want to rebuild ourselves? Do we regain our soul when the tv-set is turned off? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Who are we?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12072) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-080 — Why can't girls/women do math? — Keith Devlin > As to questions that have disappeared, as a mathematician I hope we've seen the last of the question "Why can't girls/women do math?" With women now outnumbering men in mathematics programs in most US colleges and universities, that old wives' tale (old husbands' tale?) has surely been consigned to the garbage can. Some recent research at Brown University confirmed what most of us had long suspected: that past (and any remaining present) performance differences were based on cultural stereotyping. (The researchers found that women students performed worse at math tests when they were given in a mixed gender class than when no men were present. No communication was necessary to cause the difference. The sheer presence of men was enough.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Why can't girls/women do math?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12008) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-081 — What is it that makes something alive? — Rodney A. Brooks > With the success of molecular biology explaining the mechanisms of life we have lost sight of the question one level up. We do not have any good answers at a more systems level of what it takes for something to be alive. We can list general necessities for a system to be alive, but we can not predict whether a given configuration of molecules will be alive or not. As evidence that we really do not understand what it takes for something to be alive, we have not been able to build machines that are alive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [What is it that makes something alive?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12040) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-082 — When will disease be eradicated? — Unattributed Edge contributor > By the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and doctors were sure that it was just a matter of time, and not much time at that, before most diseases would be wiped from the face of the Earth. Antibiotics would get rid of bacterial infections; vaccines would get rid of viruses; DDT would get rid of malaria. Now one drug after the next are becoming useless against resistant parasites, and new plagues such as AIDS are sweeping through our species. Except for a handful of diseases like smallpox and Guinea worms, eradication now looks like a fantasy. There are three primary reasons that this question is no longer asked. First, parasites evolution is far faster and more sophisticated than anyone previously appreciated. Second, scientists don't understand the complexities of the immune system well enough to design effective vaccines for many diseases yet. For another, the cures that have been discovered are often useless because the global public health system is a mess. The arrogant dream of eradication has been replaced by much more modest goals of trying to keep diseases in check. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 182 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [When will disease be eradicated?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12051) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-083 — What do these discarded questions tell us? — J. Doyne Farmer > The road of knowledge is littered with old questions, but by their very nature, none of them stands out above all others. The diversity of thoughtful responses given on the Edge forum, which just begin to scratch the surface, illustrates how progress happens. The evolution of knowledge is a Schumpterian process of creative destruction, in which weeding out the questions that no longer merit attention is an integral part of formulating better questions that should. Forgetting is a vital part of creation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematics, Oxford University; Director, Complexity Economics, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin School; Co-founder, Prediction Company - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What do these discarded questions tell us?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12019) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-084 — Are you hoping for a girl or a boy? — Lance Knobel > The moment of birth used to be attended by an answer to a nine-month mystery: girl or boy? Now, to anyone with the slightest curiosity and no mystical scruples, simple, non-invasive technology can provide the answer from an early stage of pregnancy. With both of our children, we chose to know the answer (in the UK about half of parents want to know), and I suspect the likelihood of the question continuing to be asked will diminish rapidly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Writer and Strategist - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Are you hoping for a girl or a boy?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12062) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-085 — Can you have an artificial intelligence? — Sherry Turkle > In cultural terms, old questions about machine intelligence has given way to a question not about the machines but about us: What kind of relationships is it appropriate to have with a machine? It is significant that this question has become relevant in a day-to-day sense during a period of unprecedented human redefinition through genomics and psychopharmacology, fields that along with robotics, encourage us to ask not only whether machines will be able to think like people, but whether people have always thought like machines - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Can you have an artificial intelligence?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11998) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-086 — Do genes influence human behavior? — Judith Rich Harris > Around the middle of the 20th century, it became politically incorrect and academically unpopular to use the word "heredity"; if the topic came up at all, a euphemism, "nature," was used in its place. The fact that the pauper and the prince had been reared in very different circumstances now came to the fore, and the behavioral differences between them was now attributed entirely to the differences in their experiences. The observation that the prince had many of the same quirks as the king was now blamed entirely on his upbringing. Unfortunately, this answer, too, was based on erroneous reasoning about ambiguous evidence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Do genes influence human behavior?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12030) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-087 — What about the workers? — Marek Kohn > MAREK KOHN'S most recent book, published last year, is As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind. His other books include The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science and Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground. He writes a weekly column on digital culture, Second Site, for theLondon Independent on Sunday. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [What about the workers?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12073) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-088 — What does all the information mean? — Raphael Kasper > We wire the schools, but never ask what all those computers in classrooms will be used for, or whether teachers know what to do with them, or whether we can devise ways to employ the technology to help people learn in new or better ways. We get cable modems, or high-speed telephone lines, but don’t think about what we can do with them beyond getting more information faster. [Really, does being able to watch the trailer for "Chicken Run" in a 2-inch square window on the computer screen after a several minute long download, constitute a major advance — and if we could cut the download time to several seconds, would that qualify?] - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What does all the information mean?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12009) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-089 — Why Teach Mathematics? — Roger Schank > ROGER SCHANK is the Chairman and Chief Technology Officer for Cognitive Arts and has been the Director of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University since its founding in 1989. One of the world's leading Artificial Intelligence researchers, he is books include: Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and People , Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory, The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind, and Engines for Education. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Why Teach Mathematics?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12041) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-090 — And why? — David Deutsch > "And why?": in other words, "what is the explanation for what we see happening?" "What is it in reality that brings about the outcome that we predict?" Whenever we fail to take that question seriously enough, we are blinded to gaps in our favoured explanation. And so, when we use that explanation to interpret regularities that we may observe, instead of understanding that the explanation was an assumption in our analysis, we regard it as the inescapable implication of our observations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Oxford; Author, The Beginning of Infinity; Recipient, Edge Computation Science Prize - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [And why?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12052) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-091 — What does the other side of the moon look like? — George Dyson > "Donald Hornig, who was head of PSAC [President's Science Advisory Committee, during the Johnson Administration] was not imaginative. I can give you an example of this. I was very enthusiastic about getting a picture of the other side of the moon. And there were various ways of doing it, sooner or later. And I argued with Hornig about it and he said, 'Why? It looks just like this side.' And it turned out it didn't. But nevertheless, that was it, and that's the real Hornig. 'Why are you so enthused about the other side of the moon? The other side of the moon looks just like this side, why would you be so interested to see it?'" - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [What does the other side of the moon look like?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11988) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2001B-092 — How do people differ in the ways they think and learn? — Stephen M. Kosslyn > STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN, a full professor of psychology at Harvard at age 34, is a researcher focusing primarily on the nature of visual mental imagery. His books include Image and Mind, Ghosts in the Mind's Machine, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, and Psychology: The Brain, the Person, the World. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [How do people differ in the ways they think and learn?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/12020) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted