# Edge 2002 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?*. 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 IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-is-your-question-why) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-question-why) - **Archive year:** 2002 - **Response rows represented:** 99 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 98 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 1 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 99 ## 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 ### EDGE2002-001 — When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead and do what you know is right? — Esther Dyson > In the world we live in, mathematicians and investors have become ever better at calculating risks, assessing outcomes, laying out possible scenarios. But real economic progress comes from taking challenges, not risks, and building something fantastic *despite* the odds, because you know you're smarter and more dedicated and more persistent, and you can gather and lead a better team, than any rational calculation would indicate. That's how new businesses get built, new markets get opened, new value gets created. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead and do what you know is right?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23719) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-002 — How does being able to learn about a changing world endow our minds with expectations, imagination, creativity, and the ability to perceive illusions? — Stephen Grossberg > Recent models of how the brain controls behavior have begun to clarify how the mechanisms that enable us to learn quickly about a changing world throughout life also embody properties of expectation, intention, attention, illusion, fantasy, hallucination, and even consciousness. I never thought that during my own life such models would develop to the point that the dynamics of identified nerve cells in known anatomies could be quantitatively simulated, along with the behaviors that they control. During the last five years, ever-more precise models of such brain processes have been discovered, including detailed answers to why the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of all our higher intelligence, is organized into layers of cells that interact with each other in characteristic ways. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and artificial neural network research - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [How does being able to learn about a changing world endow our minds with expectations, imagination, creativity, and the ability to perceive illusions?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23717) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-003 — Why is it only amongst adults in the Western world that has tradition been so insistently and constantly challenged by the raising of Edge questions? — John R. Skoyles > The public exploring of Edge questions is rare outside Western societies. Instead, "what was finally persuasive was appeal to established authority", and that, "the authority of tradition came to have more convincing effect than even direct observation and personal experience" (Robert Oliver, Communication And Culture In Ancient India And China, 1971). And as the Japanese scholar Hajime Nakamura noted, the Chinese "insisted that the traditional sacred books are more authoritative than knowledge based upon sense and inference" (Ways Of Thinking Of Eastern Peoples, 1964). Job might seem to be asking the Edge question "Why do the just suffer and the wicked flourish?" But the story of Job is not about rewarding Edge questioning but faith in the wisdom of God: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** researcher in the evolution of human intelligence in the light of recent discoveries about the brain - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Why is it only amongst adults in the Western world that has tradition been so insistently and constantly challenged by the raising of Edge questions?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23716) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-004 — What is the nature of learning? — Todd Siler > Parallel insights have emerged from the exploratory work on learning that's being conducted in the field of education and business, which involves constructing multi-dimensional symbolic models. The symbolic modeling process enables people to give form to their thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and viewpoints. By making tangible the unconscious creative process by which we use our tacit and explicit knowledge, the symbolic models help reveal what we think, how we think and what we remember. They represent our thought processes in a deep and comprehensive way, showing the different ways we use our many intelligences, styles of learning, and creative inquiry. In effect, the models demonstrate how people create things to remember, and remember things by engaging in a form of physical thinking. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [What is the nature of learning?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23715) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-005 — 'To Be or Not to Be' Remains the Question — Derrick De Kerckhove > The fact is that is "To be or not to be" is both a simple, perhaps the simplest, and a complex question, the hardest to sustain, let alone to ask. I ask it myself often — maybe as many times as five or six a week — and it is the asking, not any hope for an answer, that yields the most searing and immediate insight. I don't get it right every time, but when I do, I am thrown for a split second at the other side of being, the place where it begins. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** ['To Be or Not to Be' Remains the Question](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23712) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-006 — Why do we ask questions? — Alison Gopnik > We all take for granted the fact that human beings ask questions and seek explanations, and that the questions they ask go far beyond their immediate practical concerns. But this insatiable human curiosity is actually quite puzzling. No other animal devotes as much time, energy and brain area to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Why? Is this drive for explanation restricted to the sophisticated professional questioners on this site? Or is it a deeper part of human nature? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why do we ask questions?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11928) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-007 — What must a physical system be to be able to act on its own behalf? — Stuart A. Kauffman > In or ordinary life, we ascribe action and doing to other humans, and lower organisms, even bacteria swimming up a glucose gradient to get food. Yet physics has no "doings" only happenings, and the bacterium is just a physical system. I have struggled with the question "What must a physical system be to be able to act on its own behalf?" Call such a system an autonomous agent. I may have found an answer, such systems must be able to replicate and do a thermodynamic work cycle. But of course I'm not sure of my answer. I am sure the question is of fundamental importance, for all free living organisms are autonomous agents, and with them, doing, not just happenings, enters the universe. We do manipulate the universe on our own behalf. Is there a better definition of autonomous agents? And what does their existence mean for science, particularly physics? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 150 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What must a physical system be to be able to act on its own behalf?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11944) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-008 — Universe or multiverse, that is the question? — Paul Davies > The meta-question is, does the existence of these other universes amount to more than an intellectual exercise? Can we ever discover that the hypothesized alternative universes are really there? If not, is the multiverse not simply theology dressed up in techno jargon? And finally, could there be a Third Way, in which the ingenious features of the universe are explained neither by an Infinite Designer Mind, nor by an Infinite Invisible Multiverse, but by an entirely new principle of explanation. - **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:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Universe or multiverse, that is the question?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11960) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-009 — What is your heresy? — Kevin Kelly > I've noticed that the more scientifically educated a person is, the more likely they will harbor a quiet heresy. This is a strongly held belief that goes against the grain of their peers, something not in the accepted cannon of their friends and colleagues. Often the person finds it difficult to fully justify their own belief. It may or may not be believed by others outside their circle, that doesn't matter. What is important is that this view is not held by people they respect and admire. It's become almost a game for me to uncover a person's heresy because I've found that this unconventional view — held with much effort against the tide of their peer's views — tells me more about them than does the bulk of their well-thought out, well-reasoned, and well argued conventional views. The more unexpected the belief is, the more I like them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 149 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [What is your heresy?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11975) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-010 — What s the neurobiology of doing good and being good? — Robert Sapolsky > I've spent most of my career as a neurobiologist working on an area of the brain called the hippocampus. It's a fairly useful region — it plays a critical role in learning and memory. It's the area that's damaged in Alzheimer's, in alcoholic dementia, during prolonged seizures or cardiac arrest. You want to have your hippocampus functioning properly. So I've spent all these years trying to figure out why hippocampal neurons die so easily and what you can do about it. That's fine, might even prove useful some day. But as of late, it's been striking me that I'm going to be moving in the direction of studying a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [What s the neurobiology of doing good and being good?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11714) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-011 — Why do we tell stories? — Douglas Rushkoff > Human beings can't help but understand their world in terms of narratives. Although the theory of evolution effectively dismantled our creationist myths over a century ago, most thinking humans still harbor an attachment to the notion that we were put here, with purpose, by something. New understandings of emergence, as well as new tools for perceiving the order underlying chaos, seem to the hold the promise for a widescale liberation from the constructed myths we use to organize our experience, as well as the dangers that over-dependence on such narratives bring forth. At least I hope so. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Why do we tell stories?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11881) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-012 — How will people think about the soul? — Paul Bloom > Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness are the result of physical processes. But almost nobody else does. Common sense tells us that our mental life is the product of an immaterial soul, one that can survive the destruction of the body and brain. The physical basis of thought is, as Francis Crick put it, "an astonishing hypothesis", one that few take seriously. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [How will people think about the soul?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11559) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-013 — Do we want to live in one world, or two? — Lance Knobel > One of the great achievements of recent history has been a dramatic reduction in absolute poverty in the world. In 1820 about 85% of the world's population lived on the equivalent of a dollar a day (converted to today's purchasing power). By 1980, that percentage had dropped to 30%, but it is now down to 20%. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Writer and Strategist - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Do we want to live in one world, or two?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11728) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-014 — Would you choose universe Omega or Upsilon? — Clifford Pickover > Questions about God's omniscience are particularly mind-numbing, yet we can still ask if it is rational to believe in an omniscient God. As Steven J. Brams points out in his book Superior Beings, "The rationality of theistic belief is separate from its truth — a belief need not be true or even verifiable to be rational." However, if we posit the existence of an omniscient God, His omniscience may require him to know the history of all quarks in the universe, the states of all electrons, the vibrations of every string, and the ripples of the quantum foam. Is this the same God, who in Exodus 21 gave Moses laws describing when one should stone an ox to death? Is the God of Gluons and Galaxies the same God concerned with Israeli oxen dung? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Would you choose universe Omega or Upsilon?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11896) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-015 — Many Universes? — Martin Rees > At first sight, nothing seems more conceptually extravagant — more grossly in violation of Ockham's Razor — than invoking multiple universes. But this concept is a natural consequence of several different theories ( albeit all speculative). Andrei Linde, Alex Vilenkin and others have performed computer simulations depicting an "eternal" inflationary phase where many universes sprout from separate big bangs into disjoint regions of spacetimes. Alan Guth and Lee Smolin have, from different viewpoints, suggested that a new universe could sprout inside a black hole, expanding into a new domain of space and time inaccessible to us. And Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum suggest that other universes could exist, separated from us in an extra spatial dimension; these disjoint universes may interact gravitationally, or they may have no effect whatsoever on each other. - **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:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Many Universes?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11576) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-016 — Why am I me? — Freeman Dyson > This question was asked by my eight-year-old grandson George. In eight letters it summarizes the conundrum of personal existence in an impersonal universe. How does it happen that a couple of liters of grey matter organizes itself into the unique stream of self-awareness that calls itself George? If we could answer this question, we would be on the way toward an understanding of brain structure and function at a deep level. We would probably have in our hands the key to a more rational and discriminating treatment of mental illnesses. We might also have the key to the design of a genuine artificial intelligence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why am I me?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11744) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-017 — What kind of system of coding of semantic information does the brain use? — Daniel C. Dennett > What kind of system of "coding" of semantic information does the brain use? We have many tantalizing clues but no established model that comes close to exhibiting the molar behavior that is apparently being seen in the brain. In particular, we see plenty of evidence of a degree of semantic localization — neural assemblies over here are involved in cognition about faces and neural assemblies over there are involved in cognition about tools or artifacts, etc — and yet we also have evidence (unless we are misinterpreting it) that shows the importance of "spreading activation," in which neighboring regions are somehow enlisted to assist with currently active cognitive projects. But how could a region that specializes in, say, faces contribute at all to a task involving, say, food, or transportation or . . . . ? Do neurons have two (or more) modes of operation — specialized, "home territory" mode, in which their topic plays a key role, and generalized, "helping hand" mode, in which they work on other regions' topics? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 171 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [What kind of system of coding of semantic information does the brain use?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11898) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-018 — Why do people — even identical twins — differ from one another in personality? — Judith Rich Harris > The remaining possibility is that the unexplained variation in personality is random. Even for reared-together twins, there are minor, random differences in their experiences. I find it implausible, however, that minor, random differences in experiences could be so potent, given the ineffectiveness of substantial, systematic differences. If randomness affects personality, the way it probably works is through biological means — not genetic but biological. The human genome is smallish and the human brain is vast; the genome couldn't possibly contain precise specifications for every neuron and synapse. Identical twins don't have identical brains for the same reason that they don't have identical freckles or fingerprints. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why do people — even identical twins — differ from one another in personality?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11592) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-019 — How much can we handle? — Jaron Lanier > In the twentieth century we become powerful enough to destroy ourselves, but we seemed to be able to handle that. Now technology and information flow have improved to the point that a small number of us might be able to destroy us all. Can we handle that? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 47 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How much can we handle?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11759) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-020 — Do we want the God machine? — John Horgan > One psychedelic researcher recently suggested to me that enlightenment could be spread around the world by an infectious virus that boosts the brain's production of dimethyltryptamine, a endogenous psychedelic that the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health detected in trace amounts in human brain tissue in 1972. But whatever form the God machine takes, it would be powerful enough to transform the world into what Robert Thurman, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism (and father of Uma), calls the "Buddhaverse," a mystical utopia in which everyone is enlightened. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Do we want the God machine?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11913) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-021 — What makes a genius, and how can we have more of them? — Howard Lee Morgan > Perhaps the analysis of Einstein's brain done by Professor Diamond at Berkeley, which seems to show differences in structure in the inferior parietal region, and a higher proportion of glial cells can lead to some physiological answers. Perhaps there are chemical enhancers which can be used (legally, one would hope), to increase oxygen flow to neurons. Perhaps behavioral conditioning when we're young can help create more of the right type of structures, just as musicians who being training in early childhood have larger portions of the brain devoted to their skills. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Vice Chairman of idealab! the Pasadena - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [What makes a genius, and how can we have more of them?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11608) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-022 — Was there any choice in the creation of the Universe? — Lawrence M. Krauss > Some may suggest that this question is mere philosophical nonsense, and is akin to asking how many angels may sit on the head of a pin. However, I think that if we are lucky it may be empirically possible to address it. If, for example, we do come up with some fundamental theory that predicts the values of many fundamental quantities correctly, but that predicts that other mysterious quantities, like the energy of empty space, is generically different than the value we measure, or perhaps is determined probabilistically, this will add strong ammunition to the notion that our universe is not unique, but arose from an ensemble of causally disconnected parts, each with randomly varying values of the vacuum energy. - **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:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Was there any choice in the creation of the Universe?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11775) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-023 — Why Sleep? — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Computer models of the sleeping brain and recent experimental evidence point toward slow-wave sleep as a time during which brain cells undergo extensive structural reorganization. It takes many hours for the information acquired during the day to be integrated into long-term memory through biochemical reactions. Could it be that we go to sleep every night in order to remember better and think more clearly? - **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:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why Sleep?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11624) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-024 — Is technology going to 'wake up' or 'come alive' anytime in the future? — Robert Aunger > Bill Joy, the prominent computer scientist, argued in a Wired article last year that "the future doesn't need us" because other creatures, artificial or just post-human, are going to take over the world in the 21st century. He is worried that various technologies — particularly robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — are soon going to be capable of generating either a self-conscious machine (something like the Internet "waking up") or one capable of self-replication (nanotechnologists inspired by the vision of Eric Drexler are currently attempting to create a nano-scaled "universal assembler"). If either of these events came to pass, it would surely introduce major changes in the planetary ecology, and humans would have to find a new role to play in such a world. But is Joy right? Do we have to worry about mad scientists producing some invention that inadvertently renders us second-class citizens to machines in the next couple of decades? (Joy is so distraught by this prospect he would have everyone stop working in these areas.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist; Author, Gaining Control - **Extract length:** 169 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Is technology going to 'wake up' or 'come alive' anytime in the future?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11790) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-025 — To be or not to be? — Nicholas Humphrey > Yet the fact is that in the human case (and maybe the human case alone) natural selection has devised a peculiarly effective trick for persuading individual survival machines to fulfill this seemingly bleak role. Every human being is endowed with the mental programs for developing a "conscious self" or "soul": a soul which not only values its own survival but sees itself as very much an end in its own right (in fact a soul which, in a fit of solipsism, may even consider itself the one and only source of all the ends there are!). Such a soul, besides doing all it can to ensure its own basic comfort and security, will typically strive for self-development: through learning, creativity, spiritual growth, symbolic expression, consciousness-raising, and so on. These activities redound to the advantage of mind and body. The result is that such "selfish souls" do indeed make wonderful agents for "selfish genes". - **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:** 153 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [To be or not to be?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11639) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-026 — Do the benefits accruing to humankind — James J. O'Donnell > Given the political sensitivities of the topic, it is hard to imagine that a suitably rigorous attempt to answer this question could be organized or its results published and discussed soberly, but it is striking that there is no serious basis on which to conduct such a conversation. Religion brings peace and solace to many; religion kills people, divides societies, diverts energy and resources. How to assess the net impact in some meaningfully quantitative way? Even to imagine the possibility of such an inquiry and to think through some of the categories you would use could be very enlightening. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Do the benefits accruing to humankind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11806) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-027 — What is the relationship between being alive and having a mind? — Todd E. Feinberg > The film A.I. and the idea contained within it that robots could someday become conscious is another case in which our wishes exceed reality. Despite enormous advances in artificial intelligence, no computer is able to experience a pin prick like a simple frog, or get hungry like a rat, or become happy or sad like all of us carbon-based units. But why is this the case? It is my conjecture that this is because there are some features of being alive that makes mind, consciousness, and feelings possible. That is, only living things are capable of the markers of mind such as intentionality, subjectivity, and self-awareness. But the important question of the link between life and the creation of consciousness remains a great scientific mystery, and the answer will go a long way toward our understanding of what a mind actually is. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** M.D. is Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Chief of the Yarmon Neurobehavior and Alzheimer's Disease Center, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City - **Extract length:** 142 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [What is the relationship between being alive and having a mind?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11654) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-028 — What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century? — Roger Schank > While education is on every politician's agenda as an item of serious importance, it is astonishing that the notion of what it means to be educated never seems to come up. Our society, which is undergoing massive transformations almost on a daily basis never seems to transform its notion of what it means to be educated. We all seem to agree that an educated mind certainly entails knowing literature and poetry, appreciating history and social issues, being able to deal with matters of economics, being versatile in more than one language, understanding scientific principles and the basics of mathematics. - **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:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11821) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-029 — At what age should women say, 'No,' to first-time pregnancy? — Sylvia Paull > Scientific advances now make it possible for a woman past normal child-bearing years to bear a child. Some of my high-tech friends who range from age 43 to almost 50 are either bearing children or plan to using in-vitro techniques. These women have postponed childbearing because of their careers, but they want to experience the joys of family that their male counterparts were able to share while still pursuing their professional goals — an option far more difficult for the childbearer and primary care provider. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** founder of Gracenet - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [At what age should women say, 'No,' to first-time pregnancy?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11668) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-030 — How will the sciences of the mind constrain our theories and policies of education? — Unattributed Edge contributor > In many arenas, educators hold on to a now dated view of the child's cognitive development, failing to appreciate the innate biases that our species has been equipped with. These biases constrain not only what the child can learn, but when it might most profitably learn such things. Take, for instance, the acquisition of mathematical knowledge. Educators aim for the acquisition of precise computations. There is now, however, evidence for an innately available approximate number system, one that operates spontaneously without education. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How will the sciences of the mind constrain our theories and policies of education?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11836) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-031 — What are minds, that they are both essentially mental yet inextricably intertwined with body (and world)? — Andy Clark > What we lack is a framework, picture, or model in terms of which to understand this larger system as the cognitive engine. All current stories are forced to one side (information flows) or the other (physical dynamics). Cognitive Science thus stands in a position similar to that of Physics in the early decades of the 20th century. What we lack is a kind of 'quantum theory' of the mind: a new framework that displays mind as mind, yet as body in action too. - **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:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [What are minds, that they are both essentially mental yet inextricably intertwined with body (and world)?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11684) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-032 — Is morality relative or absolute? — Timothy Taylor > The 'ethics of care', first developed within feminist philosophy, moves beyond these positions. Instead of connecting morals either to religious rules and principles or reductive natural laws, it values shared human capacities, such as intimacy, sympathy, trust, fidelity, and compassion. Such an ethics might elide the distinction between relative and absolute by promoting species-wide common sense. Before we judge the prospect of my question vanishing as either optimistic or naïve, we must scrutinize the alternatives carefully. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Is morality relative or absolute?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11851) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-033 — Is humanity in the midst of a cognitive — Mark Stahlman > Merlin Donald has done a fine job of summarizing hundreds of inquiries into the evolution of culture and cognition in his Origins of the Modern Mind. Here, as in his other work, he posits a series of "layered" morphological, neurological and external technological stages in this evolutionary path. What he refers to as the "Third Transition" (from "Mythic" to "Theoretic" culture), appears to have begun 2500 (or so) years ago and has now largely completed its march to "mental" dominance worldwide. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Newmedia Laboratory - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Is humanity in the midst of a cognitive](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11699) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-034 — Eureka: What makes coherence so important to us? — William H. Calvin > Guessing a hidden pattern fascinates us. It's part of our pleasure in complex ritual or listening to Bach, to be able to guess what comes next some of the time. It's boring when it is completely predictable, however; it's the search for how things all hang together that is so much fun. Of course, we make a lot of mistakes. Every other winter, I get fooled into thinking that a radio has been left on, somewhere in the house, and I go in search of it — only to realize that it was just the wind whistling around the house. My brain tried to make coherence out of chaos by trying out familiar word patterns on it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Eureka: What makes coherence so important to us?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11866) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-035 — Do wormholes exist? — Gregory Benford > Surely there could be other ways to see such exotic objects. Some thought and calculations about wormhole evolution might produce a checkable prediction, as a sidelight to an existing search. Further thought is needed about the implications that extra dimensions from string theory will have on wormholes. It seems theoretically plausible that the inflationary phase of the early universe might have made negative mass string loops framing stable Visser-type wormholes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Do wormholes exist?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11225) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-036 — Is the universe really expanding? Or: Did Einstein get it exactly right? — Julian Barbour > The point of adding up the number of the variables that count in the initial value problem is this. The Newtonian three-body problem can be expressed perfectly well in terms of ratios. One can consider how the ratios of the individual sides to the perimeter of the triangle change during the evolution. This is analogous to following the evolution of the ratio of the atomic-radii to the Hubble radius in cosmology. To see if scale truly plays no role, one must go further. One must ask: do the observable ratios change in the simplest way possible as dictated by a dynamics of pure shape, or is the evolution more complicated? That is the acid test. If it is failed, absolute scale is playing its pernicious role. The Poincare criterion is an infallible test of purity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; Author, The Janus Point - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Is the universe really expanding? Or: Did Einstein get it exactly right?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11392) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-037 — What is the pertinent question? — Eduardo Punset > The answer might be that it is a self organizing system based on swarm intelligence. The nearest thing to that are construction setups and organization schemes by social insects like ants, bees and termites: A few, very simple rules, instead of preprogramming and centralized control; the right mixture of robustness and flexibility — just like DNA — hardly any supervising body at all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Spanish Television Presenter; Author, The Happiness Trip - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What is the pertinent question?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11241) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-038 — Could our lack of theoretical insight in some of the most basic questions in biology in general, and consciousness in particular, be related to us having missed a third aspect of reality — Piet Hut > Is the arena of physics, constructed out of space and time with matter/energy tightly interwoven with space and time, sufficient to fully describe all of our material world? The most fundamental debates in cognitive science take a firm "yes" for granted. The question of the nature of mind then leaves open only two options: either a form of reductionism, or a form of escapism. The latter option, a dualist belief in a separate immaterial mental realm has fallen out of favor, largely because of the astounding successes of natural science. The former, reductionism, is all that is left, whether it is presented in a crude form (denial of consciousness as real or important) or in a more fancy form (using terms like emergence, as if that would have any additional explanatory power). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Could our lack of theoretical insight in some of the most basic questions in biology in general, and consciousness in particular, be related to us having missed a third aspect of reality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11408) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-039 — Why is beauty making a comeback now? — Joel Garreau > There are an increasing number of books coming out propounding the notion that beauty is real and crosses all sorts of cultural and historic lines. In their view, that which unites us as a species in the perception of beauty is way larger than what divides us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal, The Garreau Group - **Extract length:** 47 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Why is beauty making a comeback now?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11256) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-040 — Paul Davies Responds — John Mccarthy > John McCarthy asks how animal behavior is encoded in DNA. May I sharpen the question? One of the most remarkable manifestations of inherited behavior is the way birds navigate accurately whilst migrating over vast distances. I understand that part of this skill lies with the bird's ability to use the positions of stars as beacons. Does this imply that some avian DNA contains a map of the sky? Could a scientist in principle sequence the DNA and reconstruct the constellations? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Paul Davies Responds](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11423) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-041 — How are moral assertions connected with the world of facts? — David Deutsch > Jacob Bronowski pointed out that a commitment to discovering scientific truth entails a commitment to certain values, such as tolerance, integrity, and openness to ideas and to change. But there‘s more to it than that. Not only scientific discovery, but scientific understanding itself can depend on one’s moral stance. Just look at the difficulty that creationists have in understanding what the theory of evolution says. Look at the prevalence of conspiracy theories among the supporters of bad causes, and how such people are systematically blind to rational argument about the facts of the matter. And, conversely, look at Galileo, whose factual truth-seeking forced him to question the Church’s moral authority. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Oxford; Author, The Beginning of Infinity; Recipient, Edge Computation Science Prize - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How are moral assertions connected with the world of facts?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11271) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-042 — Why doesn t conservation click? — Delta Willis > In 2001 the "Survival" series died. It was a year when conservation efforts lagged across the board, along with other failures to take the long view. Survival programs may have told people what they could no longer bear to hear (that the human species is soiling its own den) without demonstrating constructive solutions. For example, there are precious few incentives to develop alternate energy sources despite the profound vulnerabilities that our dependence on foreign energy revealed yet again. We have no "Vision Thing," despite the many clues. "It's global warming, dude," a 28 year-old auto mechanic told The New York Times as he fished in the Hudson River; "I don't care if the whole planet burns up in a hundred years. If I can get me a fish today, it's cool by me." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Paleontologist; Author, Hominid Gang - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Why doesn t conservation click?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11439) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-043 — How different could life have been? — Richard Dawkins > Emlen reared young buntings in the planetarium, giving them experience of different artificial ‘night skies’. Half of them, the controls, experienced a night sky that rotated about Polaris, as usual. The other half, the experimental birds, experienced a night sky in which the centre of rotation was Betelgeuse. The control birds ended up steering by Polaris, as usual. But the experimental birds, mirabile dictu, came to treat Betelgeuse as though it was due north. Clever, or what? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [How different could life have been?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11285) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-044 — Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. — Lee Smolin > Among the ideas which are now in play which address this issue are Julian Barbour's proposal that time does not exist, Fotini Markopoulou's proposal to replace the single quantum theory relevant for observing a system from the outside with a whole family of quantum theories, each a description of what an observer might see from a particular event in the history of the universe and 't Hooft's and Susskind's holographic principle. This last idea says that physics cannot describe precisely what is happening inside a region of space, instead we can only talk about information passing through the boundary of the region. I believe these are relevant, but none go far enough and that we need a radical reformulation of our ideas of time and change. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11454) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-045 — Can we ever escape our past, or are we doomed to a future of biobabble? — Milford H. Wolpoff > The public has been listening. This is how the U.S. census came to combine categories that Americans base on skin color "African-American," delineated by "one drop of blood" with categories based on language "Latino." However ethnic groups revitalize the behavioral issue because ethnicity and behavior are indeed related, although not by biology, but by culture. This relationship is implicitly accepted as the grounds for the profiling we have heard so much about of late, but here is the rub. Profiling has accomplished more than just making it easier to predict behaviors, actually revitalizing the issue of biology and behavior by bringing back "race" as a substitution for "ethnic group." This might well have been an unintended consequence of using "race" and "ethnic group" interchangeably, because this usage forged a replacement link between human biology and human culture. Yet however it happened, we are back where we started, toying with the notion that human groups defined by their biology differ in their behavior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology - **Extract length:** 162 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Can we ever escape our past, or are we doomed to a future of biobabble?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11300) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-046 — What comes after Science? When? — Henry Warwick > A dear friend of mine once noted: "Nobody knows and you can't find out" and I largely agree with him. However, I can also say that, like being in the presence of a bucket of bricks, this is all more an experiential thing, more like a synchronistic aesthetic moment and less like a diachronistic or ahistorically definitive mathematical proposition or linguistically intelligible conclusion. So, one can't "know" it, nor can one "find out", but one can come to a sensibility that is convincing at the time and creatively informs one's behaviour and choices. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** artist, composer, and scientist - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [What comes after Science? When?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11469) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-047 — Are the laws of nature a form of computer code that needs and uses error correction? — John D. Barrow > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Physicist; Professor of Mathematical Science, Director, Millennium Mathematics Project, University of Cambridge; Author, The Book of Universes - **Extract length:** 11 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Are the laws of nature a form of computer code that needs and uses error correction?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11315) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-048 — "What is the nature of fads, fashions, crazes, and financial manias? Do they share a structure that can in turn be found at the core of more substantial changes in a culture? In other words, is there an engine of change to be found in the simple fad that — Alan Alda > Fashions and fads are everywhere; in things as diverse as food, furnishings, clothes, flowers, children's names, haircuts, body image, even disease symptoms and surgical operations. Apparently, even the way we see Nature and frame questions about it is affected to some extent by fashion; at least according to those who would like to throw cold water on somebody else's theory. (In the current discussion, Paul Davies says, "Of late, it is fashionable among leading physicists and cosmologists to suppose that alongside the physical world we see lies a stupendous array of alternative realitiesŠ") - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** ["What is the nature of fads, fashions, crazes, and financial manias? Do they share a structure that can in turn be found at the core of more substantial changes in a culture? In other words, is there an engine of change to be found in the simple fad that](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11484) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-049 — Can wealth be distributed? — John Markoff > Even with productivity showing startling increases as a consequence of new information technologies everything suggests that the gap between rich and poor is growing dramatically globally and even beginning to increase again in the U.S. So much for trickle down economics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Pulitzer Prize-winning Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Whole Earth - **Extract length:** 41 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Can wealth be distributed?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11165) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-050 — Why do we fear the wrong things? — David G. Myers > Will yesterday's safety statistics predict the future? Even if not, terrorists could have taken down 50 more planes with 60 passengers each and — if we'd kept flying — we'd still have been ended last year safer on commercial flights than on the road. Flying may be scary, but driving the same distance should be many times scarier. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Why do we fear the wrong things?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11330) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-051 — If the medium is indeed the message, does (or can) the message define the medium? — Gerd Stern > (As a poet, I don't think I need to explicate the question.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media artist and cheese maven and the author - **Extract length:** 12 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [If the medium is indeed the message, does (or can) the message define the medium?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11500) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-052 — Is the universe a quantum computer? — Seth Lloyd > The universe is quantum mechanical, and its dynamics can be simulated precisely and efficiently using quantum information processing. The amount of quantum computation required to perform this simulation is finite and has been calculated. Consequently, there is no obvious way to distinguish the universe from a very large quantum logic circuit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 51 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Is the universe a quantum computer?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11180) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-053 — Would an extra-terrestrial civilization develop the same mathematics as ours? If not, how could theirs possibly be different? — Karl Sabbagh > In writing my next book, about maths, I have been led to ponder this question by the fact that there are philosophers, and a few mathematicians, who believe that it is conceivable that there could be intelligences with a fully developed mathematics that does not, for example, recognize the integers or the primes, let alone Fermat's Last Theorem or the Riemann Hypothesis. And yet, whole numbers seem to us such a basic property of "things", that unless there were intelligences that were not embodied in any way (and/or couldn't "see" the discrete stars, for example) they would be bound to come across number and all that follows. But then, I suppose you could imagine intelligent beings which consisted, say, of density differences in a gas but lacked boundaries separating one from another. In any case, if such creatures do exist, it rather pours cold water on the use by SETI of maths (e.g. prime x prime pictorial grids) to communicate with them - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 162 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Would an extra-terrestrial civilization develop the same mathematics as ours? If not, how could theirs possibly be different?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11347) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-054 — Will humankind be able to use its growing — Christopher J. Anderson > Today's evolutionary psychologists provide compelling arguments why this picture might be accurate. A species programmed to acquire stuff might well spread itself successfully across the globe. But evolution is blind. It has no plan regarding what might happen to that species when the globe has been conquered. And in the meantime our genes don't give a damn about our happiness. For them it's just another propagation technology... perhaps made doubly efficient by ensuring the carrot is yanked away each time it comes within reach. To achieve true happiness we may need to be a great deal wiser than the loudest demons in our head would suggest. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, TED conferences, TED Talks; author, TED Talks - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Will humankind be able to use its growing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11515) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-055 — Why do we continue to act as if the universe were constructed from nouns linked by verbs, when we know it is really constructed from verbs linked by nouns? — Steve Grand > Life and Mind are perhaps the most obvious examples of things that subsist as pure process, but atoms, electrons, buildings and societies are in truth no different. To some extent we already know and understand this, and yet I think we can't stop ourselves from dividing hardware from software and treating the former as more real and significant than the latter. Even when we attempt to regard life and mind in a process way we often end up reifying them again as 'information' (as if information were a kind of substance) and end up missing the point. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, Cyberlife Research; author, Creation: Life and How to Make It - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Why do we continue to act as if the universe were constructed from nouns linked by verbs, when we know it is really constructed from verbs linked by nouns?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11195) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-056 — How will computation and communication change our everyday lives, again? — Rodney A. Brooks > Already tens of thousands of people have cochlear implants with direct electronic to neural connections to restore their hearing. Multiple groups are working on retinal implants, either into the eyeball, or interfacing to V1 at the back of the head; again to replace lost capabilities such as those resulting from macular degeneration. A few quadraplegics have direct neural connections to computer interfaces so that they can control a mouse and even type. As progress is made with these silicon/neural interfaces, pushed along by clinical pressures to cure those who are impaired, we can expect more and more "plastic surgery" applications. A direct neural typing interface first perhaps, and later data going the other way directly from the network into our brains. There are considerable challenges to be met in understanding neural "coding" to do this, but the clinical imperative is pushing this work along. - **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:** 144 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [How will computation and communication change our everyday lives, again?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11363) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-057 — Where Are They? — George Dyson > When Enrico Fermi asked his famous question (now known as the Fermi Paradox) more than fifty years ago — if there is advanced extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and technology, why don't we see unmistakable evidence of it? — it was the era of 60-megaton atmospheric bomb tests and broadcast television, with unlimited fusion power in plain sight. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Where Are They?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11530) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-058 — How can a small number of genes build a complex mental machine? — Gary Marcus > The DNA does not, however, provide a literal blueprint of a newborn's mind. We have only around 35,000 genes, but tens of billions of neurons. How does a relatively small set of genes combine to build a complex brain? As Richard Dawkins has put it, the DNA is more like a recipe than a blueprint. The genome doesn't provide a picture of a finished product, instead it provides a set of instructions for assembling an embryo. Those instructions govern basic developmental processes such as cell division and cell migration; it has long been known that such processes are essential to building bodies, and it now is becoming increasingly clear that the same processes shape our brains and minds as well. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [How can a small number of genes build a complex mental machine?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11210) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-059 — When will we emerge from the quantum tunnel of obscurity? — Antony Valentini > One wonders where things will go from here. On the one hand, in the last five years the subject of the interpretation of quantum mechanics has suddenly become more respectable thanks to the rising technology of quantum information and computation, which has shown that something of practical use — novel forms of communication and computation — can emerge from thoughts about the meaning of quantum mechanics. But on the other hand, there is a danger that the problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics will be pushed aside in the rush to develop "real" technological applications of the peculiarities of quantum phenomena. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Pilot-wave theory - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [When will we emerge from the quantum tunnel of obscurity?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11377) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-060 — The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace — Margaret Wertheim > Of course this is one of the oldest philosophical questions in science but still one of the most mysterious. For most of Western history the cannonical answer has been some version of Platonism, some variation on the esentially Pythagorean idea that the matherial universe has been formed according to a set of transcendent and a priori mathematical relations or laws. These relations/laws Pythagaoras himself called the divine armonia of the cosmos, and have often been referred to since as the "cosmic harmonies" or the "music of the spheres". For Pythagoras numbers were actually gods, and the quest for mathematical relations in nature was a quest for the divine archetypes by which he believed that matter had literally been in-formed. Throughout the age of science, and even today, most physicists seem to be Platonists. Many are even Pythagoreans, implicitly (if not always with much concious reflection) making an association between the mathematical laws of nature and a transcendent being. The common association today of a "theory of everything" with "the mind of God" is simply the latest efflourescence of a two and a half millenia-old tradition which has always viewed physics as a quasi-religious activity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science writer and commentator - **Extract length:** 194 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11544) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-061 — Untitled Response — Rafael Núñez > Studying non-human animals, contemporary biology, evolutionary theory, and modern ethology have gathered enough knowledge to respond to questions regarding the nature of aggression, social power, alliance formation, hierarchical domination, and attack-defense behavior. Psychology, anthropology and cognitive science have added important pieces extending this knowledge into human animals. From these studies contemporary science has got some deep understanding about what peace is about. In a nutshell, the moral is that there is no absolute, ideal or ultimate peace in the animal kingdom. Peace turns out to be a fragile local phenomenon that depends on circumstances, population density, biological needs, availability of resources, and so on. If you value peace, the best you can do is to provide conditions for peace, not to "install" peace itself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Untitled Response](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-question-why) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-062 — Why do people kill other people? — David M. Buss > No offense against another human being inflicts greater costs than killing. Simply put, it's bad to be dead. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands are murdered every year; tens of millions over the past century. From baby killing to genocide, from Susan Smith to Osama bin Laden, people in every culture experience the urge to kill. Some act on it. They do so despite legal injunctions, religious prohibitions, cultural interdictions, the risk of retaliation, and the threat of spending life in a cage. Dead bodies, a trail of grief, and a thirst for vengeance lie in their wake. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Why do people kill other people?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10933) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-063 — What is the missing ingredient — not genes, not upbringing — that shapes the mind? — Steven Pinker > Perhaps it is chance. While in the womb, the growth cone of an axon zigged rather than zagged, and the brain gels into a slightly different configuration. If so, it would have many implications that have not figured into our scientific or everyday way of thinking. One can imagine a developmental process in which millions of small chance events cancel one another out, leaving no difference in the end product. One can imagine a different process in which a chance event could derail development entirely, making a freak or monster. Neither of these happens. The development of organisms must use complex feedback loops rather than blueprints. Random events can divert the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope of functioning designs for the species defined by natural selection. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What is the missing ingredient — not genes, not upbringing — that shapes the mind?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11078) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-064 — Untitled Response — Brian Greene > It is hard to conceive of a universe that does not exist in space and persist through time: space and time seem to be the basic framework of the cosmos. Yet what is space and what is time? Are they "things" or are they merely the language we use for organizing events we witness in the world? Moreover, are they even fundamental? Could it be that space and time conveniently summarize more basic ideas somewhat as temperature summarizes the motion of atomic constituents? Will we one day discover "atoms" of space and time---true, fundamental elements which space and time as we now know them are simply coarse approximations? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder of the World Science Festival and Chairman, Science Festival Foundation; Professor of Mathematics & Physics, Columbia University; author, The Hidden Reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Elegant Universe - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Untitled Response](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-question-why) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-065 — Why bother? Or: Why do we go further and explore new stuff? — Tor Nørretranders > Many human skills enable an individual to do something with less physiological effort. If you are good at skiing (and I am not) it takes less energy to climb that mountain. One can even argue forcefully that a mental "understanding" of a phenomenon allows one to perceive it with less increase in brain metabolism. But not all skills are directed at a reduction of the expenditure. Many creative activities involve a huge effort to explore new issues or phenomena. The better skier goes beyond the first mountain. New worlds and ideas are explored. Why do we bother — or why do some of us bother? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why bother? Or: Why do we go further and explore new stuff?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10947) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-066 — What, me worry? — Samuel Barondes > Psychiatrists know that some people have pathological forms of worry. There are names for this such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder; and treatments, such as psychotherapy and Prozac. But what about the rest of us? What is the optimal balance between worry and contentment? Should we all be offered some kind of training to help us achieve this optimal balance? And how should we apply our growing understanding of the brain mechanisms that control these feelings? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [What, me worry?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11092) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-067 — Is it possible to know what is good and what is evil? — James Gilligan > 2. When humanity made the transition, at the time of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, to a new and higher stage of its collective cognitive development by progressing from theology and philosophy to science, it became more and more difficult for people to see how it could be possible to answer the old pre scientific theological and philosophical questions, "what is good and what is evil?" Those questions came to be seen as unanswerable and hence meaningless because what the scientific revolution showed, above all, was that what we call "knowledge" (scientia) is possible when, and only when, it can be framed in the form of hypotheses that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by means of experience, i.e., empirical data and observations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry Psychiatry , NYU School of Medicine - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Is it possible to know what is good and what is evil?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10807) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-068 — Are space, time, and all other physical quantities only relational? — Carlo Rovelli > What do we actually know about the physical world after the scientific revolution of the last century? Before the XXth century, the picture of the physical world was simple: matter formed by particles (and fields) moving in time over the stage of space, pushed and pulled by forces, according to deterministic equations, which we could write down. That's it.. But the 20th Century has changed all that in depth. Matter has quantum properties: particles can be delocalized -as if they were clouds- although they manifest themselves always as a single point when interacting with us. Space and time are not just curved: they are dynamical entities very much like the electric and magnetic field. Is there a new consistent picture of the physical world, that takes all this new knowledge into account? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Are space, time, and all other physical quantities only relational?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10960) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-069 — Why is religion so important to most Americans and so trivial to most intellectuals? — David Gelernter > Is it just a matter of IQ? (Though I thought intellectuals no longer believed in IQ...) But empirically it can't be an IQ issue, because so many of history's greatest minds based their lives on religion — from Michaelangelo or Bach to Spinoza or Dante or Kant. Do modern intellectuals actually believe that all such people are naively deluded? Or could they be missing something themselves? - **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:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Why is religion so important to most Americans and so trivial to most intellectuals?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11107) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-070 — Does life on Earth have a future? — Stuart Pimm > A median estimate is that a third of all the species will be on the fast track to extinction within the next quarter century. Over 90% of all languages will be gone by then, because languages spoken by fewer than a million people are rarely taught to children. Most tropical forests will be gone by 2025 and with them, their species and peoples. Global warming will ensure that the species that survive do so in the wrong place. Coral reefs will be cooked alive in too-warm oceans, tropical glaciers will long have been only a memory preserved in the National Geographic photo collection. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; Author, The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Does life on Earth have a future?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10821) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-071 — Is there, or should we expect, a fracture in the logical basis on which people now look for a description of the nexus between particle physics and cosmology? — Sir John Maddox > Question: Since the 1930s, we have had to live with Godel's theorem — the apparently unshaken proof by the logician Kurt Godel that there can be no system of mathematical logic that is at once consistent (or free from contradictions) and complete (in the sense of being comprehensive). The question is whether there is, or whether we should expect, such a fracture in the logical basis on which people now look for a description of the nexus between particle physics and cosmology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor (Emeritus), Nature; Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Is there, or should we expect, a fracture in the logical basis on which people now look for a description of the nexus between particle physics and cosmology?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10974) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-072 — Can there be a science of human potential and the good life? — Steven R. Quartz > In my primary research, I ask, what is the neural basis of human intelligence, and how can our understanding of brain development and plasticity be used to construct more effective learning environments? With Gabrielle Starr, an English professor at NYU and Anne Hamker here at Caltech, we are asking, what is the brain basis of aesthetic experience, and how can such an understanding be used to deepen our emotional life? With Michael Dobry, co-director of the graduate industrial design program at the Art Center College of Design, we are asking, what is the relation between design and the brain, and how can the design of daily life be more in line with the brain's capacities? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Co-author, Cool - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Can there be a science of human potential and the good life?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11121) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-073 — Is the PC desktop really dead? — Mark Hurst > Much ado has been made lately over the problems of the PC "desktop metaphor," the system of folders and icons included in Macintosh and Windows PCs. Critics of the desktop rightly point out that today's PC users encounter much more information than in the 1980s, when the desktop was first introduced. While I understand these criticisms, I question whether the desktop is really dead ‹ in other words, whether the solution really lies in building a better desktop. Instead, I think that the real issue is the increased information, not the interface between it and the user. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of Internet consulting firm Creative Good - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Is the PC desktop really dead?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10835) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-074 — What Is Real? — Robert Provine > Sensory examples are instructive because the nature of the psychophysical linkage is relatively clear. It's easy to imagine sensory limits of bandwidth (the size of our "peephole"), absolute sensitivity, or even modes of sensitivity (our "peep-holes"). Neurological limits on thinking may be as common as those on sensing, but they are more illusive — it's hard to think about what you can't think about. A good example from physics is our difficulty in understanding the space-time continuum — our intellect fails us when we move beyond the dimensions of height, width, and depth. Other evidence of our neurological reality-generator is revealed by its malfunction in illusions, hallucinations, and dreams, or in brain damage, where the illusion of reality does not simply degrade, but often splinters and fragments. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What Is Real?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10989) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-075 — Is there Progress? — Jordan Pollack > I work on the question of evolution, not as it exists in Nature, but as a formal system which enables open-ended learning. Can we understand the process in enough detail to simulate the progress of biological complexity in pure software or electronics? A phenomena has appeared in many of my laboratory's experiments in learning across many different domains like game playing and robots. We have dubbed it a "Mediocre Stable State." It is an unexpected systematic equilibrium, where a collection of sub-optimal agents act together to prevent further progress. In dynamical systems, the MSS hides within cycles of forgetting that which has been already been learned. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Is there Progress?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11134) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-076 — How do womens minds work? — Eberhard Zangger > Try this question on any man: All you'll get for an answer is a shrugging of shoulders along with a puzzled facial expression. The one thing neither rocket scientists nor astrophysicists will ever be able to comprehend is how women think and feel. Bill Watterson's eternal six-year old Calvin (from "Calvin & Hobbes"), no smart scholar, but the epitome of the self-assured yet forever puzzled boy, summarizes his incomprehension of the opposite gender: "What is it like to be a girl? Is it like being a bug? I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature has played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it!" - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing director of science communications - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [How do womens minds work?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10849) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-077 — Can democracy survive complexity? — Stephen Schneider > More seriously, for democracy to function representatives need to make critical value trade-offs for citizens. But how can citizens send messages on how they would like their values to drive policies when the issues are so complex that very few citizens — and not too many politicians either — really understand enough of what might happen and at what probabilities to know how to make decisions that do optimize the value signals from citizens. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Can democracy survive complexity?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11003) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-078 — Is God nothing more than a sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence? — Michael Shermer > When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades. Extrapolate that out a hundred thousand years, or a million years (an eye blink on an evolutionary time scale and thus a realistic estimate of how far advanced ETI will be, unless we happen to be the first space-faring species, which is unlikely), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for just how godlike these creatures would seem. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Is God nothing more than a sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11150) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-079 — Will unification ever come to a stop? — Anton Zeilinger > Unification of opposites is an underlying theme in the development of humanity. Newton showed us that the same laws govern the motion of heavenly bodies and apples falling on Earth. Darwin unified the concept of being a human with that of being another living organism. There have been numerous other unifications in the history of mankind. So, how will it go on? Which notions appearing to us as very distinct today will turn out to be the same for future generations? Will there ever be a limit to unification? Will we in the end be able to show that everything just stems from one single fundamental idea? Or two? Or many? Or infinitely many? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Will unification ever come to a stop?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10862) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-080 — How different could minds be? — Richard Nisbett > Plato believed that human knowledge was inborn. Kant and Peirce agreed that much of knowledge had to exist prior to birth or it would be impossible to understand or learn anything. Until quite lately, psychologists were almost uniformly opposed to this notion, insisting that only process not content could be part of our native equipment. Piaget was typical (and highly influential) in asserting that only learning skills and inferential procedures such as deductive rules and schemes for induction and causal analysis were native. He also maintained that these were identical for all people with undamaged minds, and that development of such processes ended with adolescence. Content could be almost infinitely variable because these processes operate on different inputs for different people in different situations and cultures. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How different could minds be?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11017) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-081 — Why do we decorate? — Brian Eno > Why do all the human cultures that we know of decorate things? Why not just leave them alone? Why put in all that extra, and apparently non-functional, energy? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 28 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Why do we decorate?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10876) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-082 — The hows and whys of what led to us — Keith Devlin > The best evidence we have from anthropology is that our ancestors acquired this capacity some time between 75,000 and 200,000 years ago. (The evidence is in the form of manufactured artifacts that early humans left behind, which indicate such a level of abstract thinking and communication.) But how — and in terms of natural selection, why — did our ancestors acquire this capacity? All we know for sure is that it came at the end of a three-and-a-half-million year period in which the average brain size of our ancestors grew to roughly its present level, approximately nine times larger than is normal for a mammal of our body size and about twice that of a present-day ape. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The hows and whys of what led to us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11033) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-083 — Why do people like music? — W. Daniel Hillis > People from every culture like listening to some kind of music, so it seems that it is something that is wired into us. Is there an evolutionary advantage to liking music? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 31 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Why do people like music?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10891) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-084 — In view of globalization, which is here to stay, and the events of September 11and its aftermath, which were a shock to most of us, do we need to make fundamental changes in our educational goals and methods? — Howard Gardner > Because of globalization, the capacity to think across disciplines, to synthesize wide ranges of information efficiently and accurately, to deal with individuals and institutions with which one has no personal familiarity, to adjust to the continuing biological and technological revolutions, are at a far greater premium. And because of the events of September 11, we need to think much more deeply about the nature of democratic institutions and the threats to them, the role and limits of tolerance and civil liberties, the fate of scarce resources, profound gaps across religions and cultures, just to name a few. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [In view of globalization, which is here to stay, and the events of September 11and its aftermath, which were a shock to most of us, do we need to make fundamental changes in our educational goals and methods?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11049) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-085 — How much can we expect the social sciences to help build a just and free society? — Dan Sperber > But might, in the future, a more scientific social science emerge (probably alongside, rather than in place of, the more common sense social sciences that we know)? Its role would not be to ground political action — it is not the role of science to say what is good and what is bad — but to inform it well enough so that more daring long-sighted political action could be undertaken — action that might help build a more just and freer society —without being all too likely to have its unforeseen consequences compromise its initial goals, as happened with communism? This is my question. I don't know the answer. - **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:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How much can we expect the social sciences to help build a just and free society?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10905) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-086 — Is it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science and math, crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000 high schools of this great nation? — Leon M. Lederman > The world is caught up in a paroxysm of change. Key words: globalism, multinational corporations, ethical influences in business, explosive growth of science-based technology, fundamentalism, religion and science, junk science, alternative medicines, rich vs. poor gap, who supports research, where is it done, how is it used, advances in cognition science, global warming, the disconnect between high school and college....these and other influences are undergoing drastic changes and all will have some impact on science, mathematics and technology and therefore on how our schools must change to produce graduates who can function in the 21st century...function and assume positions of leadership. Is it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science and math, crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000 high schools of this great nation? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Is it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science and math, crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000 high schools of this great nation?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11063) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-087 — What is value? — J. Doyne Farmer > Oscar Wilde once said that "A fool is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". Economists have struggled with this question for several centuries and have largely given up - most modern economists tacitly assert that price and value are the same thing, except for possible "externalities" that prevent the market system from functioning correctly. But many of us still believe that the value of a good poem or a comforting word may not be fully reflected in its price, and that value to society and GDP are only weakly correlated. - **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:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [What is value?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10765) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-088 — What is the difference between the sigmundoscope and the sigmoidoscope? Less cryptically, how is everyday narrative logic different from extensional mathematical logic? — John Allen Paulos > Furthermore, unlike mathematical logic, story logic does not allow for substitutions. In mathematical contexts, for example, the number 3 can always be substituted for the square root of 9 or the largest whole number smaller than the constant without affecting the truth of the statement in which it appears. By contrast, although Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly, and even though Superman equals Clark Kent, the substitution of one for the other can't be made. Oedipus is attracted to the woman Jocasta, not to the extensionally equivalent person who is his mother. In the impersonal realm of mathematics, one's ignorance or one's attitude toward some entity does not affect the validity of a proof involving it or the allowability of substituting equals for equals. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What is the difference between the sigmundoscope and the sigmoidoscope? Less cryptically, how is everyday narrative logic different from extensional mathematical logic?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10919) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-089 — When will our souls be upgraded? — Frank Schirrmacher > The Shakespearean soul will not be able to cope with the innovations and insights of the near future. Star Wars, Star Trek, even Gibson might prove unrealistic — not because of their description of hardware, but because of their description of the soul. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Influential German journalist, essayist, best-selling author - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [When will our souls be upgraded?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11077) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-090 — Do folk concepts of the mind have anything to do with what really happens in the brain? — David Berreby > For hundreds of years the pattern in science has been to overturn folk concepts, and it seems to me the brain may be the next field for such a conceptual revolution. It may be that in a hundred years people will speak of free will, or the unconscious, or emotion, in the way that we now speak of "sunrise" or "forever" — words that serve for day-to-day talk, but don't map reality. We know the sun doesn't rise because it is the earth that moves and we know that humanity and its planet and the universe itself won't last forever. I see signs that concepts of the mind are due for the same sort of revision. And so that's the question I keep returning to. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Do folk concepts of the mind have anything to do with what really happens in the brain?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10630) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-091 — Will cognitive science change the way we think as much as other sciences have? — George Lakoff > As I read through the questions posed by my distinguished colleagues from other disciplines, I realized that the very questions they posed look very different to me as a cognitive linguist than they would to most very well educated Edge readers. It occurred to me that simply commenting on their questions from the perspective of a cognitive linguist would provide some idea of how the world might look different to someone who is acutely aware of the finding of cognitive science, especially cognitive linguistics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Fellow at The Rockridge Institute; Author, The Little Blue Book - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Will cognitive science change the way we think as much as other sciences have?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10645) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-092 — Who and what are the we in we? — Paul W. Ewald > The high rates of mental illness highest achievers, particularly in the arts, however, demand a different explanation. If the illnesses associated with such creativity are caused by infection and the infection cannot be explained as a consequence of the creative lifestyle, as indicated by the season of birth associations, then the range of feasible explanations is narrowed. The least tortuous conclusion is that prenatal infections damage the development of the brain, generating a brain that functions differently from the naturally selected brain. Most of the time these pathogens just muck up the mind, causing mental illness without generating anything in return. But in a few lucky throws of the dice, a different mind that is brilliantly creative. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Who and what are the we in we?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10659) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-093 — Is our brain smart enough to understand the brain? — Stanislas Dehaene > I see at least two reasons for hope. First, we seem to have a remarkable capacity for constructing new mental representations through culture. Through metaphor, we are able to connect old representations together in new ways, thus building new mathematical objects that extend our brain's representational power (e.g. Cartesian coordinates, a blend between number and space concepts). Second, and conversely, Nature's bag of tricks doesn't seem so huge. Indeed, this is perhaps the biggest unanswered question: how is it that with a few simple mathematical objects, we are able to understand the outside physical world in such detail? The mystery of this "unreasonable efficacy of mathematics", as Wigner put it, suggests a remarkable adaptation of our brain to the structure of the physical world. Will this adaptation suffice for the brain to understand itself? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Is our brain smart enough to understand the brain?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10673) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-094 — Do languages matter? — Xeni Jardin > If we measure the value of a language simply by the number of people it allows us to communicate with, bigger would always be better, and the death of an endangered language would be of no consequence to the rest of the world. If 128 million people speak French, and roughly 100 people speak Pomo — a nearly extinct indigenous language in California — then French is exponentially more valuable than Pomo. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tech Culture Journalist; Partner, Contributor, Co-editor, Boing Boing; Executive Producer, host, Boing Boing Video - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Do languages matter?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10687) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-095 — After postfeminism, whats next? — Tracy Quan > Of course, postfeminism makes sense only when basic legal and civil rights exist for both sexes — it's an irrelevant luxury for too many women on this planet. Letitia Baldrige, the dean of American manners (among other things), recently defined her own position as that of a "conservative feminist." It makes sense, for the restless privileged daughters of Western feminism, to become moderate postfeminists — not centrists, exactly, but realists. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel. - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [After postfeminism, whats next?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10702) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-096 — How do we scale up the number of quality human relationships one person can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly connected world, how does one person interact with a hundred thousand, a million or even a billion people? — Adrian Scott > With these trends, the friction costs of personal introductions go down, and consequently the value of quality measurement and gatekeeping go up dramatically. As the depth of knowledge in a relationship increases, the threshold point at which you 'really know someone' increases also. It's an arms race of intimacy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, Rayz - **Extract length:** 49 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How do we scale up the number of quality human relationships one person can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly connected world, how does one person interact with a hundred thousand, a million or even a billion people?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10717) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-097 — Why is life so full of suffering? — Randolph Nesse > The second question is why we so often continue to do things that make us miserable. Why do we pursue goals we can't reach given that this causes so much unhappiness? Why we can't take Buddha's advice and transcend our desires? The answer is that people who have given up difficult goals have had fewer children. These goals are not just wealth, power and sex. Trying without success to protect and help one's children causes intense suffering and everyone recognizes why we can't give up this goal. The evolutionary origins of our motives do not make us helpless puppets but they can help us to understand why controlling our desires is difficult. - **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:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Why is life so full of suffering?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10733) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-098 — Who am I? What am I? — Ray Kurzweil > Although the copy shares my pattern, it would be hard to say that the copy is me because I would (or could) still be here. You could even scan and copy me while I was sleeping. If you come to me in the morning and say, “Good news, Ray, we’ve successfully reinstantiated you into a more durable substrate, so we won’t be needing your old body and brain anymore,” I may beg to differ. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal Developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Who am I? What am I?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10746) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2002-099 — Will non-sustainable developments (i.e., atmospheric change, deforestation, fresh water use, etc.) become halted in pleasant ways of our choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice? — Jared Diamond > To my mind, by far the most important question concerns the way in which our currently non-sustainable course gets resolved in the next several decades. Our present course with regards to many of our demands on the environment cannot be sustained for more than several decades. Those demands include atmospheric change, deforestation, fresh water use, global warming, overfishing, production of toxic materials, utilization of available photosynthetic capacity, and utilization of topsoil. Hence the interesting question is whether these non-sustainable developments become halted in pleasant ways of our choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Will non-sustainable developments (i.e., atmospheric change, deforestation, fresh water use, etc.) become halted in pleasant ways of our choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10629) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted