# Edge 2005 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?*. 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 DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-do-you-believe-is-true-even-though-you-cannot-prove-it) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-do-you-believe-is-true-even-though-you-cannot-prove-it) - **Archive year:** 2005 - **Response rows represented:** 120 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 120 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 120 ## 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 ### EDGE2005-001 — Psychologist, Harvard University — Daniel Gilbert > We take each other's consciousness on faith because we must, but after two thousand years of worrying about this issue, no one has ever devised a definitive test of its existence. Most cognitive scientists believe that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the complex interaction of decidedly nonconscious parts (neurons), but even when we finally understand the nature of that complex interaction, we still won't be able to prove that it produces the phenomenon in question. And yet, I haven't the slightest doubt that everyone I know has an inner life, a subjective experience, a sense of self, that is very much like mine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Harvard University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11932) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-002 — Psychologist, Harvard University: Author, Wild Minds — Unattributed Edge contributor > I'll go one step further: I bet that when we discover life on other planets, that although the materials may be different for running the computation, that they will create open ended systems of expression by means of the same trick, thereby giving birth to the process of universal computation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 50 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Harvard University: Author, Wild Minds](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11947) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-003 — Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh — Nicholas Humphrey > If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or laymen, find the "hard problem" of consciousness just so hard. Nature has meant it to be hard. Indeed "mysterian" philosophers—from Colin McGinn to the Pope—who bow down before the apparent miracle and declare that it's impossible in principle to understand how consciousness could arise in a material brain, are responding exactly as Nature hoped they would, with shock and awe. - **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:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11964) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-004 — Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Changing Minds — Howard Gardner > As we attempt to master an activity, neural connections of varying degrees of utility or disutility form. Certain of us have nervous systems that are predisposed to develop quickly along the lines needed to master specific activities (chess) or classes of activities (mathematics) that happen to be available in one or more cultures. Accordingly, assuming such exposure, we will appear talented and become experts quickly. The rest of us can still achieve some expertise, but it will take longer, require more effective teaching, and draw on intellectual faculties and brain networks that the talented person does not have to use. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Changing Minds](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11979) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-005 — Science Historian; Author, Project Orion — George Dyson > During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic "tok" and "tlik." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Science Historian; Author, Project Orion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11917) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-006 — Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science — Haim Harari > Based on common sense and on an observation of the pattern of the known particles, without any experimental evidence and without any comprehensive theory, I have believed for many years, and I continue to believe, that the electron, the neutrino and the quarks are divisible. They are presumably made of different combinations of the same small number (two?) of more fundamental sub-particles. The latter may or may not have the string structure, and may or may not be themselves composites. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11765) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-007 — Psychologist, Visiting Lecturer, University of the West of England, Bristol; Author The Meme Machine — Susan Blackmore > When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises—will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds—but this too I cannot prove. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Visiting Lecturer, University of the West of England, Bristol; Author The Meme Machine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11615) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-008 — Physicist, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, How to Build a Time Machine — Paul Davies > One of the biggest of the Big Questions of existence is, Are we alone in the universe? Science has provided no convincing evidence one way or the other. It is certainly possible that life began with a bizarre quirk of chemistry, an accident so improbable that it happened only once in the entire observable universe—and we are it. On the other hand, maybe life gets going wherever there are earthlike planets. We just don't know, because we have a sample of only one. However, no known scientific principle suggests an inbuilt drive from matter to life. No known law of physics or chemistry favors the emergence of the living state over other states. Physics and chemistry are, as far as we can tell, "life blind." - **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:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Physicist, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, How to Build a Time Machine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11780) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-009 — Mathematician, Stanford University; Author, The Millennium Problems — Keith Devlin > Or consider Thomas Hales, who has been waiting for six years to hear if the mathematical community accepts his 1998 proof of astronomer Johannes Keplers 360-year-old conjecture that the most efficient way to pack equal sized spheres (such as cannonballs on a ship, which is how the question arose) is to stack them in the familiar pyramid-like fashion that greengrocers use to stack oranges on a counter. After examining Hales' argument (part of which was carried out by computer) for five years, in spring of 2003 a panel of world experts declared that, whereas they had not found any irreparable error in the proof, they were still not sure it was correct. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Mathematician, Stanford University; Author, The Millennium Problems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11630) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-010 — Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy — Kevin Kelly > I believe, but cannot prove, that the DNA in your body (and all bodies) varies from part to part. I make this prediction based on what we know about biology, which is that natures abhors uniformity. No where else in nature do we see identity maintained to such exactness. No where else is there such fixity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11796) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-011 — Physicist, Stanford University — Leonard Susskind > If I were to flip a coin a million times I'd be damn sure I wasn't going to get all heads. I'm not a betting man but I'd be so sure that I'd bet my life or my soul. I'd even go the whole way and bet a year's salary. I'm absolutely certain the laws of large numbers—probability theory—will work and protect me. All of science is based on it. But, I can't prove it and I don't really know why it works. That may be the reason why Einstein said, "God doesn't play dice." It probably is. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Physicist, Stanford University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11645) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-012 — Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton University — Philip W. Anderson > My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11811) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-013 — Neuroscientist, Stanford University, Author, A Primate's Memoir — Robert Sapolsky > Well, of course, it is tempting to go for something like, "That the wheel, agriculture, and the Macarena were all actually invented by yetis." Or to do the sophomoric pseudo-ironic logic twist of, "That every truth can eventually be proven." Or to get up my hackles, draw up to my full height and intone, "Sir, we scientists believe in nothing that cannot be proven by the whetstone of science, verily our faith is our lack of faith," and then go off in a lab coat and a huff. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Neuroscientist, Stanford University, Author, A Primate's Memoir](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11660) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-014 — Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Wet Mind — Stephen M. Kosslyn > There are many implications of these ideas, ranging from reasons why we behave in certain ways toward others to foundations of ethics and even to religion. In fact, one could even argue that when your body dies, part of your mind may survive. But before getting into such dark and dusty corners, it would be nice to have firm footing—to collect evidence that these speculations are in fact worth taking seriously. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Wet Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11826) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-015 — Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, Disturbing the Universe — Freeman Dyson > The digits in a big power of two seem to occur in a random way without any regular pattern. If it ever happened that the reverse of a power of two was a power of five, this would be an unlikely accident, and the chance of it happening grows rapidly smaller as the numbers grow bigger. If we assume that the digits occur at random, then the chance of the accident happening for any power of two greater than a billion is less than one in a billion. It is easy to check that it does not happen for powers of two smaller than a billion. So the chance that it ever happens at all is less than one in a billion. That is why I believe the statement is true. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, Disturbing the Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11675) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-016 — Neuroscientist, New York University; Author, The Synaptic Self — Joseph LeDoux > Most of what I have said applies mainly to the content of conscious experience. But there is another aspect of consciousness that is less problematic scientifically. It is possible to study the processes that make consciousness possible even if we can't study the content of consciousness in other animals. This is exactly what is done in studies of working memory in non-human primates. One approach by that has had some success in the area of conscious content in non-human primates has focused on a limited kind of consciousness, visual awareness. But this approach, by Koch and Crick, mainly gets at the neural correlates of consciousness rather than the causal mechanisms. The correlates and the mechanisms may be the same, but they may not. Interestingly, this approach also emphasizes the importance of prefrontal cortex in making visual awareness possible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious - **Extract length:** 138 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Neuroscientist, New York University; Author, The Synaptic Self](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11841) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-017 — Linguist, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Author, Doing Our Own Thing — John McWhorter > Much has been made over the parallels between the evolution of languages and the evolution of animals and plants. However, I believe that one important difference is that while animals and plants can evolve towards simplicity as well as complexity depending on conditions, languages do not evolve towards simplicity in any significant, overall sense—unless there is some sociohistorical factor that puts a spoke in the wheel. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Linguist, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Author, Doing Our Own Thing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11690) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-018 — Physicist, MIT; Author, When Things Start to Think — Neil Gershenfeld > Naturally, this question has a technical spin for me. My current passion is the creation of tools for personal fabrication based on additive digital assembly, so that the uses of advanced technologies can be defined by their users. It's still no more than an assumption that that will lead to more good things than bad things being made, but, like the accumulated experience that democracy works better than monarchy, I have more faith in a future based on widespread access to the means for invention than one based on technocracy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Physicist, MIT; Author, When Things Start to Think](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11856) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-019 — Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, Author, Authentic Happiness — Martin Seligman > In spite of its widespread acceptance in the religious and academic world, there is not a shred of evidence, not an iota of data, which compels us to believe that nobility and virtue are somehow derived from negative motivation. On the contrary, I believe that evolution has favored both positive and negative traits, and many niches have selected for morality, co-operation, altruism, and goodness, just as many have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Director, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; Author, Flourish - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, Author, Authentic Happiness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11705) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-020 — Physicist, Case Western Reserve University; Author, Atom — Lawrence M. Krauss > At every instant there may be many universes being born, and others dying. But philosophy aside, the existence of many different causally disconnected universes—regions with which we will never ever be able to have direct communication, and thus which will forever be out of reach of direct empirical verification—may have significant impacts on our understanding of our own universe. Their existence may help explain why our own universe has certain otherwise unexpected features, because in a metaverse with a possibly infinite number of different universes, which may themselves vary in their fundamental features, it could be that life like our own would evolve in only universes with a special set of characteristics. - **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:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Physicist, Case Western Reserve University; Author, Atom](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11871) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-021 — Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Author, Designing World-Class E-Learning — Roger Schank > While he was arguing with his father in law, his wife, and nearly everyone he knew about his boat, defending his decision with all the logic he could muster, destroying the very conceptions of boats they had in mind, the simple truth was his unconscious mind was ruling the decision making process. It wanted what it knew and loved, too bad for the conscious which had to figure how to explain this to everybody else. - **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:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Author, Designing World-Class E-Learning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11554) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-022 — Psychologist, UC-Berkeley; Coauthor, The Scientist In the Crib — Alison Gopnik > Similarly, as adults when we need to learn something new, say when we learn to skydive, or work out a new scientific idea, or even deal with a new computer, we become vividly, even painfully, conscious of what we are doing—we need, as we say, to pay attention. As we become expert we need less and less attention, and we experience the actual movements and thoughts and keystrokes less and less. We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children, but really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus. Again there is a certain amount of brain evidence for this. Some brain areas, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, consistently light up for adults when they are deeply engaged in learning something new. But for more everyday tasks, these areas light up much less. For children, though the pattern is different—these areas light up even for mundane tasks. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 170 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Psychologist, UC-Berkeley; Coauthor, The Scientist In the Crib](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11720) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-023 — Neurobiologist, University of Washington; Author, A Brief History of the Mind — William H. Calvin > "Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal—unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception..." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Neurobiologist, University of Washington; Author, A Brief History of the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11886) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-024 — Physicist, University of Pennsylvania; Author, A Matter of Degrees — Gino Segre > Neutrinos, once in thermal equilibrium, were supposedly freed from their bonds to other particles about two seconds after the Big Bang. Since then they should have been roaming undisturbed through intergalactic space, some 200 of them in every cubic centimeter of our Universe, altogether a billion of them for every single atom. Their presence is noted indirectly in the Universe's expansion. However, though they are presumably by far the most numerous type of material particle in existence, not a single one of those primordial neutrinos has ever been detected. It is not for want of trying, but the necessary experiments are almost unimaginably difficult. And yet those neutrinos must be there. If they are not, our whole picture of the early Universe will have to be totally reconfigured. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Physicist, University of Pennsylvania; Author, A Matter of Degrees](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11570) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-025 — Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate — Steven Pinker > At the level of genetics, critics have pointed to the small number of genes in the human genome (now thought to be less than 25,000) and to their similarity to those of other animals. I believe that geneticists will find that there is a large store of information in the noncoding regions of the genome (the so-called junk DNA), whose size, spacing, and composition could have large effects on how genes are expressed. That is, the genes themselves may code largely for the meat and juices of the organism, which are pretty much the same across species, whereas how they are sculpted into brain circuits may depend on a much larger body of genetic information. I also believe that many examples of what we call "the same genes" in different species may differ in tiny ways at the sequence level that have large consequences for how the organism is put together. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 151 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11735) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-026 — Philosopher, Tufts University Author, Freedom Evolves — Daniel C. Dennett > (3) a host of further experimental work demonstrating the importance of what Thomas Metzinger calls the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR) in enabling the sorts of experiences we consider central to our own adult consciousness. This work will demonstrate that animal cleverness never requires the abilities thus identified in humans, and that animals are in fact incapable of appreciating many things we normally take for granted as aspects of our conscious experience. - **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:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Philosopher, Tufts University Author, Freedom Evolves](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11902) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-027 — Astrophysicist, Institute of Advanced Study — Piet Hut > Note: undoubtedly, the notion of what counts as "understandable" will continue to change. What physicists consider to be understandable now is very different from what had been regarded as such one hundred years ago. For example, quantum mechanics tells us that repeating the same experiment will give different results. The discovery of quantum mechanics led us to relax the rigid requirement of a deterministic objective reality to a statistical agreement with a not fully determinable reality. Although at first sight such a restriction might seem to limit our understanding, we in fact have gained a far deeper understanding of matter through the use of quantum mechanics than we could possibly have obtained using only classical mechanics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Astrophysicist, Institute of Advanced Study](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11585) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-028 — Physicist, Columbia University; Author, How The Universe Got Its Spots — Janna Levin > I simultaneously believe more and less than he does. It is rational to believe what all of my empirical and logical tests of the world confirm—that there is a reality that exists independent of me. That the coffee will not fly upwards. But it is a belief nonetheless. Once I've gone that far, why stop at the perimeter of mundane experience? Just as we can test the temperature of a hot beverage with a tongue, or a thermometer, we can test the temperature of the primordial light left over from the big bang. One is no less real than the other simply because it is remarkable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Barnard College of Columbia University; Author, Black Hole Survival Guide; Director of Sciences, Pioneer Works - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Physicist, Columbia University; Author, How The Universe Got Its Spots](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11750) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-029 — Computer scientist, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center; Author, Calculus and Pizza — Clifford Pickover > If our thoughts and consciousness do not depend on the actual substances in our brains but rather on the structures, patterns, and relationships between parts, then Tinkertoy minds could think. If you could make a copy of your brain with the same structure but using different materials, the copy would think it was you. This seemingly materialistic approach to mind does not diminish the hope of an afterlife, of transcendence, of communion with entities from parallel universes, or even of God. Even Tinkertoy minds can dream, seek salvation and bliss—and pray. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Computer scientist, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center; Author, Calculus and Pizza](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11600) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-030 — Inventor and Technologist; Author, The Age of Spiritual Machines — Ray Kurzweil > In 1988, California Institute of Technology physicists Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Uri Yertsever described in some detail how such wormholes could be engineered. Based on quantum fluctuation, so-called "empty" space is continually generating tiny wormholes the size of subatomic particles. By adding energy and following other requirements of both quantum physics and general relativity (two fields that have been notoriously difficult to integrate), these wormholes could in theory be expanded in size to allow objects larger than subatomic particles to travel through them. Sending humans would not be impossible, but extremely difficult. However, as I pointed out above, we really only need to send nanobots plus information, which could go through wormholes measured in microns rather than meters. Anders Sandberg estimates that a one-nanometer wormhole could transmit a formidable 10^69 bits per second. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal Developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Inventor and Technologist; Author, The Age of Spiritual Machines](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11296) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-031 — Neuroscience Researcher; Author, The End of Faith — Sam Harris > Twenty-two percent of Americans claim to be certain that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. Another twenty-two percent believe that he is likely to do so. The problem that most interests me at this point, both scientifically and socially, is the problem of belief itself. What does it mean, at the level of the brain, to believe that a proposition is true? The difference between believing and disbelieving a statement—Your spouse is cheating on you; you've just won ten million dollars—is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. The instant we accept a given representation of the world as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Neuroscience Researcher; Author, The End of Faith](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11449) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-032 — Biologist, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Investigations — Stuart A. Kauffman > Consider this, the number of possible proteins 200 amino acids long is 20 raised to the 200th power or about 10 raised to the 260th power. Now, the number of particles in the known universe is about 10 to the 80th power. Suppose, on a microsecond time scale the universe were doing nothing other than producing proteins length 200. It turns out that it would take vastly many repeats of the history of the universe to create all possible proteins length 200. This means that, for entities of complexity above atoms, such as modestly complex organic molecules, proteins, let alone species, automobiles and operas, the universe is on a unique trajectory (ignoring quantum mechanics for the moment). That is, the universe at modest levels of complexity and above is vastly non-ergodic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Biologist, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Investigations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11310) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-033 — Biologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. — Lynn Margulis > The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings—to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine—from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise. Cilia were once free-agents but they became an integral part of all animal cells. Even though the concept that cilia evolved from spirochetes has not been proved I think it is true. Not only is it true but, given the powerful new techniques of molecular biology I think the hypothesis will be conclusively proved. In the not-too-distant future people will wonder why so many scientists were so against my idea for so long! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Biologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11464) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-034 — Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, Drawing Life — David Gelernter > I believe (I know—but can't prove!) that scientists will soon understand the physiological basis of the "cognitive spectrum," from the bright violet of tightly-focused analytic thought all the way down to the long, slow red of low-focus sleep thought—also known as "dreaming." Once they understand the spectrum, they'll know how to treat insomnia, will understand analogy-discovery (and therefore creativity), and the role of emotion in thought—and will understand that thought takes place not only when you solve a math problem but when you look out the window and let your mind wander. Computer scientists will finally understand the missing mystery ingredient that made all their efforts to simulate human thought such naive, static failures, and turned this once-thriving research field into a ghost town. (Their failures were "static" insofar as people think in different ways at different times—your energetic, wide-awake mind works very differently from your tired, soon-to-be-sleeping mind; but artificial intelligence programs always "thought" in the same way all the time.) - **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:** 162 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, Drawing Life](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11160) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-035 — Psychologist, New York University; Author, The Birth of the Mind — Gary Marcus > Of course, this experiment doesn't prove that there is an "algebra" circuit in the brain—psychological techniques alone can't do that. For final proof, we'll need neuroscientific techniques far more sophisticated than contemporary brain imaging, such that we can image the brain at the level of interactions between individual neurons. But every bit of evidence that we can collect now—from babies, from toddlers, from adults, from psychology and from linguistics—seems to confirm the idea that algebra-like abstraction is a fundamental component of thought. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist, New York University; Author, The Birth of the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11325) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-036 — Physicist, UC Irvine; Author, Deep Time — Gregory Benford > Perhaps it is a similar philosophical failure of imagination to think, as I do, that when we see order, there is usually an ordering principle. But what can constrain the nature of physical law? Evolution gave us our ornately structured biosphere, and perhaps a similar principle operates in selecting universes. Perhaps our universe arises, then, from selection for intelligences that can make fresh universes, perhaps in high energy physics experiments. Or near black holes (as Lee Smiolin supposed), where space-time gets contorted into plastic forms that can make new space-times. Then an Ur-universe that had intelligence could make others, and this reproduction with perhaps slight variation ion "genetics" drives the evolution of physical law. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Physicist, UC Irvine; Author, Deep Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11479) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-037 — Science Writer; Author, Rational Mysticism — John Horgan > The neural code is the software, algorithm, or set of rules whereby the brain transforms raw sensory data into perceptions, memories, decisions, meanings. A complete solution to the neural code could, in principle, allow scientists to monitor and manipulate minds with exquisite precision; you might, for example, probe the mind of a suspected terrorist for memories of past attacks or plans for future ones. The problem is, although all brains operate according to certain general principles, each person's neural code is to a certain extent idiosyncratic, shaped by his or her unique life history. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Science Writer; Author, Rational Mysticism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11175) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-038 — Writer and Television Producer; Author, The Riemann Hypothesis — Karl Sabbagh > Intelligent objects with boundaries between being and non-being surely want to be measured— "I'm bigger that you", "I need a size 312 overcoat"—but perhaps there are life-forms which don't have boundaries but are continuously varying density changes in some Jovian sea. Intelligent life might be disembodied or at least lack a discrete body and merely be transmitted between various points in a solid material matrix, so that it was impossible to distinguish one intelligent being from another. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Writer and Television Producer; Author, The Riemann Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11341) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-039 — Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain — Arnold Trehub > A large body of experimental findings, clinical findings, and phenomenal reports can be explained within a coherent framework by the neuronal structure and dynamics of my theoretical model. In addition, the model accurately predicts many classical illusions and perceptual anomalies. So I believe that the neuronal mechanisms and systems that I have proposed provide a true explanation for many important aspects of human cognition and phenomenal experience. But I can't prove it. Of course, competing theories about the brain, cognition, and consciousness can't be proved either. But I can't prove it. Providing the evidence is the best we can do—I think. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11494) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-040 — Neuroscience researcher; Coauthor, Up From Dragons — John R. Skoyles > Human evolution therefore changed illness by offloading decisions about deployment whenever possible on to professionals. People that make themselves experienced in disease and injury, after all, have the background knowledge to know our bodies much better than ourselves. Healing professionals—healers, shamans, witch doctors and medics—exist in all human cultures. Of course, such professionals were seen by their patients as offering real treatments—and a few did help such as advising rest, eating well and some medicinal herbs. But most of what they did was ineffective. Doctors indeed had to wait until 1908 and Paul Ehrlich's discovery of Salvarsan for treating syphilis before they had a really effective treatment for a major disease. Nonetheless earlier doctors and healers were considered by themselves and their patients to be in the possession of very powerful cures. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** researcher in the evolution of human intelligence in the light of recent discoveries about the brain - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Neuroscience researcher; Coauthor, Up From Dragons](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11190) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-041 — Anthropologist, University of Michigan; Author, In God's We Trust — Scott Atran > There is no God that has existence apart from people's thoughts of God. There is certainly no Being that can simply suspend the (nomological) laws of the universe in order to satisfy our personal or collective yearnings and whims—like a stage director called on to change and improve a play. But there is a mental (cognitive and emotional) process common to science and religion of suspending belief in what you see and take for obvious fact. Humans have a mental compulsion—perhaps a by-product of the evolution of a hyper-sensitive reasoning device to serve our passions—to situate and understand the present state of mundane affairs within an indefinitely extendable and overarching system of relations between hitherto unconnected elements. In any event, what drives humanity forward in history is this quest for non-apparent truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Emeritus Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford; Author, Talking to the Enemy - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Anthropologist, University of Michigan; Author, In God's We Trust](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11357) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-042 — Writer and Developmental Psychologist; Author, The Nurture Assumption — Judith Rich Harris > The Neanderthals disappeared when Homo sapiens, who by then had learned the art of sewing, took over Europe and Asia. This new species, descended from a southern branch of Homo erectus, was unique among primates in being hairless. In their view, anything with fur on it could be classified as "animal"—or, to put it more bluntly, game. Neanderthal disappeared in Europe for the same reason the woolly mammoth disappeared there: the ancestors of the modern Europeans ate them. In Africa today, hungry humans eat the meat of chimpanzees and gorillas. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Writer and Developmental Psychologist; Author, The Nurture Assumption](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11509) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-043 — Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Author, Being No One — Thomas Metzinger > The third story will focus on the Now, the emergence of a psychological moment—on a deeper understanding of what William James' called the "specious present". Experts on short term memory and neural network modelers with tell this story for us. As it unfolds, it will explain the emergence of a subjective present and let us understand how conscious experience, in its simplest and most essential form, is the presence of a world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Adjunct Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study; Author, The Ego Tunnel - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Author, Being No One](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11205) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-044 — Psychologist, University of Arkansas — Jesse Bering > Of course, adopting a parsimonious stance allows one to easily deduce that we as corpses cannot experience mental states, but this theoretical proposition can only be justified by a working scientific knowledge (i.e., that the non-functioning brain is directly equivalent to the cessation of the mind). By stating that psychological states survive death, or even alluding to this possibility, one is committing oneself to a radical form of mind-body dualism. Consider how bizarre it truly is: Death is seen as a transitional event that unbuckles the body from its ephemeral soul, the soul being the conscious personality of the decedent and the once animating force of the now inert physical form. This dualistic view sees the self as being initially contained in bodily mass, as motivating overt action during this occupancy, and as exiting or taking leave of the body at some point after its biological expiration. So what, exactly, does the brain do if mental activities can exist independently of the brain? After all, as John Dewey put it, mind is a verb, not a noun. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Associate Professor, Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand; Author, Perv - **Extract length:** 177 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist, University of Arkansas](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11373) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-045 — Novelist; Author, Globalhead — Bruce Sterling > I can sum my intuition up in five words: we're in for climatic mayhem. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Fiction Author, Mirrorshades - **Extract length:** 14 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Novelist; Author, Globalhead](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11524) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-046 — Economist; Managing Director of CyberLab Interactive Productions GmbH (Burda Media Group). — Jean Paul Schmetz > When considering this question one has to remember the basis of the scientific method: formulating hypotheses that can be disproved. Those hypotheses that are not disproved are thought to be true until disproved. Since it is more glamorous for a scientist to formulate hypotheses that it is to spend years disproving existing ones from other scientists and that it is unlikely that someone will spend enough time and energy trying to disprove his/her own statements, our body of scientific knowledge is surely full of statements we believe to be true but will eventually be proved to be false. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director of CyberLab Interactive Productions GmbH - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Economist; Managing Director of CyberLab Interactive Productions GmbH (Burda Media Group).](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11220) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-047 — Research Scientist, MIT School of Architecture and Planning; Author, The Alex Studies — Irene Pepperberg > Work on mirror neurons over the past decade has provided intriguing evidence, although no solid proof, for the gestural origins of speech. What can be called the mirror neuron hypothesis(MNH) suggests that only a small re-organization of the nonhuman primate brain was needed to create the wiring that underlies speech acquisition/learning. What is missing from the MNH is a model of the development of language from speech; it is here that I believe that a model based on avian vocalizations is most valuable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Research Scientist, MIT School of Architecture and Planning; Author, The Alex Studies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11388) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-048 — Computer Scientist; Personal Computer Visionary, Senior Fellow, HP Labs — Alan Kay > Another guess I made long ago—that does not yet have a body of evidence to support it—is that what is special about the computer is analogous to and an advance on what was special about writing and then printing. It's not about automating past forms that has the big impact, but as McLuhan pointed out, when you are able to change the nature of representation and argumentation, those who learn these new ways will wind up to be qualtitatively different and better thinkers, and this will (usually) help advance our limited conceptions of civilization. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding member of Xerox PARC; President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist; Personal Computer Visionary, Senior Fellow, HP Labs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11539) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-049 — Untitled Response — Richard Dawkins > I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 51 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Untitled Response](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-do-you-believe-is-true-even-though-you-cannot-prove-it) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-050 — Mathematical trader; Author, Fooled By Randomness — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > Now I am convinced, yet cannot prove it quantitatively, that such overestimation can be generalized to anything where people give you a narrative-style story from past information, without experimentation. The difference is that the economists got caught because we have data (and techniques to check the quality of their knowledge) and historians, news analysts, biographers, and "pundits" can hide a little longer. Basically historians might get a small trend here and there, but they did miss on the big events of the past centuries and, I am convinced, will not see much coming in the future. It was said: "the wise see things coming". To me the wise persons are the ones who know that they can't see things coming. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Mathematical trader; Author, Fooled By Randomness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11403) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-051 — Computer Scientist, MIT Media Laboratory — Alex "Sandy" Pentland > What would it be like to be part of a distributed intelligence but still with an individual consciousness? Well for starters, you might expect to see the collective mind 'take over' from time to time, directly guiding the individual minds. In humans, the behavior of angry mobs and frightened crowds seem to qualify as examples of a 'collective mind' in action, with non-linguistic channels of communication usurping the individual capacity for rational behavior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, MIT; Director, MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs; Author, Social Physics - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist, MIT Media Laboratory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11251) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-052 — Psychiatrist and Neurologist, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Author, Altered Egos — Todd E. Feinberg > In addition to being alive, therefore, it appears that a living thing must be a being, must possess a self, to possess a mind. But silicon chips are not alive, and computers are not beings. I argue that this is so because the particular material substance and arrangement of the brain is essential to the creation of consciousness and "beinghood." Computers will never achieve consciousness because in order for a computer to be "conscious like us" it will need to be made of living stuff like us, to grow like us, and unfortunately, to be able to die like us. - **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:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Psychiatrist and Neurologist, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Author, Altered Egos](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11404) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-053 — Computer Scientist and Musician — Jaron Lanier > It's not only the narcissism of the young (and not so young) human mind or the primality of the control of one's own body that makes self-transformation compelling. Evolution, as generous as she ended up being with us humans, was stingy with potential means of expression. Compare us with the mimic octopus which can morph into all sorts of creatures and objects, and can animate its skin. An advanced civilization of cephalopods might develop words as we know them, but probably only as an adjunct to a natural form of post-symbolic communication. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist and Musician](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11266) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-054 — Software: Concepts, Artwork & Interface Design; Byteburg Research Lab above the Rhein River — Kai Krause > Nothing ever is as beautiful as its abstraction through the rose-colored glasses of anticipation...The toddlers hope for Santa Claus on Christmas eve turns out to be a fat guy with a fashion issue. Waiting for the first kiss can give you waves of emotional shivers up your spine, but when it then actually happens, it's a bunch of molecules colliding, a bit of a mess, really. It is not the real moment that matters. In Anticipation the moment will be glorified by innocence, not knowing yet. In Remembrance the moment will be sanctified by memory filters, not knowing any more. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Software: Concepts, Artwork & Interface Design; Byteburg Research Lab above the Rhein River](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11419) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-055 — Cosmologist, Cambridge University; Author, The Infinite Book — John D. Barrow > That our universe is infinite in size, finite in age, and just one among many. Not only can I not prove it but I believe that these statements will prove to be unprovable in principle and we will eventually hold that principle to be self-evident. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Physicist; Professor of Mathematical Science, Director, Millennium Mathematics Project, University of Cambridge; Author, The Book of Universes - **Extract length:** 45 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Cosmologist, Cambridge University; Author, The Infinite Book](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11281) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-056 — Psychologist, Harvard University — Elizabeth Spelke > I believe, first, that all people have the same fundamental concepts, values, concerns, and commitments, despite our diverse languages, religions, social practices, and expressed beliefs. If defenders and opponents of abortion, Israelis and Palestinians, or Cambridge intellectuals and Amazonian jungle dwellers were to get beyond their surface differences, each would discover that the common ground linking them to members of the other group equals that which binds their own group together. Our common conceptual and moral commitments spring from the core cognitive systems that allow an infant to grow rapidly and spontaneously into a competent participant in any human society. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Harvard University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11434) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-057 — Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone — W. Daniel Hillis > I believe, but cannot prove, that our species is passing through a transitional stage, from being animals to being true humans. I do not pretend to understand what true humans will be like, and I expect that I would not even understand it if I met them. Yet, I believe that our own universal sense of right and wrong is pointing us in the right direction, and that it is the direction of our future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10829) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-058 — Psychologist, University of Texas, Austin; Author, The Evolution of Desire — David M. Buss > While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many—the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Psychologist, University of Texas, Austin; Author, The Evolution of Desire](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10987) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-059 — Computer Scientist, Brandeis University — Jordan Pollack > There is an isomorphism between evolution, economics, and education. In economics, the supervisor is a central government or super rich investor, in evolution, it is the "intelligent designer", and in education, its the teacher or outside examiners. In economic systems, despite an almost religious belief in Laissez-Faire and incentive-based behavior, economic systems are prone to winner-take-all phenomena and boom-bust cycles. They seem to require benevolent regulation, or "managed competition" to prevent the "rich get richer" dynamic leading to monopoly, which leads inevitably to corruption and kleptocracy. In evolution, scientists reject the intelligent designer as a creationist ruse, but so far our working models for open-ended evolution haven't worked, and prematurely convergence to mediocrity. In education, evidence of auto-didactic learning in video-games and sports is suppressed in academics by top-down curriculum frameworks and centralized high-stakes testing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist, Brandeis University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11144) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-060 — Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland; Author, Laughter — Robert Provine > My thinking about unconscious control was shaped by my field studies of the primitive play vocalization of laughter. When I asked people to explain why they laughed in a particular situation, they would concoct some reasonable fiction about the cause of their behavior—"someone did something funny," "it was something she said," "I wanted to put her at ease." Observations of social context showed that such explanations were usually wrong. In clinical settings, such post hoc misattributions would be termed "confabulations," honest but flawed attempts to explain one's actions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland; Author, Laughter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10842) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-061 — Physicist, currently at CERN — Maria Spiropulu > I'll take the question and make a pseudo-invariant transformation that makes it more apt to my brain. When Bohr was asked what is the complementary variable of "truth" (Wirklichkeit) he replied with no hesitation "clarity" (Klarheit). Contrary to Bohr, and since neither truth nor clarity are quantum mechanical variables, real truth and comprehensive clarity should be simultaneously achievable given rigorous experimental evidence. [In particular since "Wirklichkeit" means reality, and "Klarheit" is clarity in the sense of good understanding.] - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology; Founder, AQT/INQNET - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Physicist, currently at CERN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11001) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-062 — Psychologist, Yale University; Author, Descartes' Baby — Paul Bloom > Instead, moral development involves the construction of a intricate formal system that makes contact with the external world in a significant way. This cannot be entirely right. We know that gut-feelings, such as reactions of empathy or disgust, have a major influence on how children and adults reason about morality. And no serious theory of moral development can ignore the role of natural selection in shaping our moral intuitions. But what I like about Macnamara's proposal is that it allows for moral realism. It allows for the existence of moral truths that people come to discover, just as we come to discover truths of mathematics. We can reject the nihilistic position (help by many researchers) that our moral intuitions are nothing more than accidents of biology or culture. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Yale University; Author, Descartes' Baby](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10857) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-063 — Genomics Researcher; Founder & President, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation — J. Craig Venter > Our human centric view of life is clearly unwarranted. From the millions of genes that we have just discovered in environmental organisms over the past months we learn that a finite number of themes are used over and over again and could have easily evolved from a few microbes arriving on a meteor or on intergalactic dust. Panspermia is how life is spreads throughout the universe and we are contributing to it from earth by launching billions of microbes into space. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** A leading scientist of the 21st century for Genomic Sciences; Co-Founder, Chairman, Synthetic Genomics, Inc.; Founder, J. Craig Venter Institute; Author, A Life Decoded - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Genomics Researcher; Founder & President, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11015) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-064 — Psychologist, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University; Author, Shyness — Philip Zimbardo > The "group mind" that developed among these soldiers was created by a set of known social psychological conditions, some of which are nicely featured in Golding's Lord of the Flies. The same processes that I witnessed in my Stanford Prison Experiment were clearly operating in that remote place: Deindividuation, dehumanization, boredom, groupthink, role-playing, rule control, and more. Beyond the relatively benign conditions in my study, in that Iraqi prison, the guards experienced extreme fatigue and exhaustion from working 12-hour shifts, 7 days a week, for over a month at a time with no breaks. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University; Author, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University; Author, Shyness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10871) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-065 — Editor-in-Chief, Discover Magazine — Steve Petranek > Second, a team of astrophysicists reported in July that radio emissions from Sagittarius B2, a nebula near the center of the Milky Way, indicate the presence of aldehyde molecules, the prebiotic stuff of life. Aldehydes help form amino acids, the fundamental components of proteins. The same scientists previously reported clouds of other organic molecules in space, including glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar. Outer space is thus full of complex molecules—not just atoms—necessary for life. Comets in other solar systems could easily deposit such molecules on planets, as they may have done in our solar system with earth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-in-chief of Discover Magazine - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Editor-in-Chief, Discover Magazine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11030) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-066 — Editor-in-Chief, New Scientist — Alun Anderson > I can't prove that they are, but I think in principle it will be provable one day and there's a lot to be gained about thinking about the worlds of these relatively simple creatures, both intellectually—and even poetically. I don't mean that they are conscious in even remotely the same way as humans are; if that we were true the world would be a boring place. Rather the world is full of many overlapping alien consciousnesses. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Editor-in-Chief, New Scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10886) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-067 — Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; Author, The Essential Difference — Simon Baron-Cohen > We have had these three pieces of the jigsaw since 1997, published in the scientific literature. They do not yet prove the assortative mating theory. They simply point to it being highly likely. Direct tests of the theory are still needed. I will be the first to give up this idea if it is proven wrong, since I'm not in the business of holding onto wrong ideas. But I won't give up the idea simply because it will be unpopular to certain groups (such as those who want to believe that the cause of autism is purely environmental). I will hold onto the idea until it has been properly tested. Popperian science is about being able to let go of an idea when the evidence goes against it, but it is also about being able to hold onto an idea until the evidence has been collected, if you have enough reasons to believe it might be true. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers - **Extract length:** 157 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; Author, The Essential Difference](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11044) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-068 — Science writer and Commentator; Author, Pythagoras' Trousers — Margaret Wertheim > Studying ice crystals is Libbrecht's hobby—in his "day job" he is one of the hundreds of physicists who are working on the LIGO detector which is designed to detect gravitational waves that are believed to emanate from black holes and other massive cosmological entities. Gravity waves have been predicted by the general theory of relativity, and hence physicists believe they must exist. Here the matter of belief has literally bought into being a an extremely expensive machine. Any successful theory of everything will have to account for gravity, the most mysterious of all the forces and the one physicists least understand. Like the other three forces, physicists believe gravity must ultimately manifest itself in both wave and particle forms. LIGO is designed to detect such waves, if indeed they do exist. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** science writer and commentator - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Science writer and Commentator; Author, Pythagoras' Trousers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10901) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-069 — Technology Editor, The Economist — Tom Standage > My argument is not based so much on the scientific evidence—because there isn't very much of it, and what little there is has either found no effect or is statistically dubious. Instead, it is based on a historical analogy with previous scares about overhead power lines and cathode-ray computer monitors (VDUs). Both were also thought to be dangerous, yet years of research—decades in the case of power lines—failed to find conclusive evidence of harm. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Business Affairs Editor, The Economist; Author, The Edible History of the Humanity - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Technology Editor, The Economist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11058) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-070 — Philosopher and Novelist, Trinity College; Author, Incompleteness — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > I also believe that since not all of the properties of nature are mathematically expressible—why should they be? it takes a very special sort of property to be so expressible—that there are aspects of nature that we will never get to by way of our science. I believe that our scientific theories—just like our formalized mathematical systems (as proved by Gödel)—must be forever incomplete. The very fact of consciousness itself (an aspect of the material world we happen to know about, but not because it was revealed to us by way of science) demonstrates, I believe, the necessary incompleteness of scientific theories. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Philosopher and Novelist, Trinity College; Author, Incompleteness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10759) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-071 — Physicist; Retired director, American Institute of Physics; Author, The Quantum World — Kenneth W. Ford > Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter. Good luck to the SETI people and applause for their efforts, but consider that microbes have inhabited Earth for at least 75 percent of its history, whereas intelligent life has been around for but the blink of an eye, perhaps 0.02 percent of Earth's history (and for nearly all of that time without the ability to communicate into space). Perhaps intelligent life will have staying power. We don't know. But we do know that microbial life has staying power. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Retired Director of the American Institute of Physics - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Physicist; Retired director, American Institute of Physics; Author, The Quantum World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10915) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-072 — Physicist and Nobel Laureate; Director Emeritus, Fermilab; Coauthor, The God Particle — Leon M. Lederman > My friend, the theoretical physicist, believed so strongly in String Theory, "It must be true!" He was called to testify in a lawsuit, which contested the claims of String Theory against Quantum Loop Gravity. The lawyer was skeptical. "What makes you such an authority?" he asked. "Oh, I am without question the world's most outstanding theoretical physicist", was the startling reply. It was enough to convince the lawyer to change the subject. However, when the witness came off the stand, he was surrounded by protesting colleagues. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Physicist and Nobel Laureate; Director Emeritus, Fermilab; Coauthor, The God Particle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11071) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-073 — Psychologist, University of Virginia — Jonathan Haidt > But I further believe (and cannot prove) that hostility toward religion is an obstacle to progress in psychology. Most human beings live in a world full of magic, miracles, saints, and constant commerce with divinity. Psychology at present has little to say about these parts of life; we focus instead on a small set of topics that are fashionable, or that are particularly tractable with our favorite methods. If psychologists took religious experience seriously and tried to understand it from the inside, as anthropologists do with other cultures, I believe it would enrich our science. I have found religious texts and testimonials about purity and pollution essential for understanding the emotion of disgust. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Psychologist, University of Virginia](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10773) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-074 — Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual Intelligence — Donald D. Hoffman > If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience. There are, of course, many proposals for where to find such a theory—perhaps in information, complexity, neurobiology, neural darwinism, discriminative mechanisms, quantum effects, or functional organization. But no proposal remotely approaches the minimal standards for a scientific theory: quantitative precision and novel prediction. If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 147 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, Visual Intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10930) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-075 — Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Columnist, Scientific American; Author Science Friction — Michael Shermer > It has been computed that in order for a computer in the far future of the universe to resurrect in a virtual reality every person who ever lived or could have lived, with all causal interactions between themselves and their environment, it would need 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10^123 zeros) of memory. Suffice it to say that no computer within the conceivable future will achieve this level of power; likewise no human brain even comes close. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Columnist, Scientific American; Author Science Friction](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11087) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-076 — Biologist, University of Liverpool; Author, The Origins of Larvae — Donald I. Williamson > The acquisition of larvae by hybridization came much later, when there was little spare genome capacity in recipes for single animals, and it is still going on. In the echinoderms (the group that includes sea-urchins and starfish) there is evidence that there were no larvae in either the Cambrian or the Ordovician (the following period), and this might well apply to other major groups. Acquiring parts, rather than larvae, by hybridization continued, I believe, throughout the Cambrian and Ordovician and probably later, but, as genomes became larger and filled most of the available space, later hybridizations led to smaller changes in adult form or to acquisitions of larvae. The gradual evolution of better mechanisms to prevent eggs being fertilized by foreign sperm resulted in fewer fruitful hybridizations, but occasional hybridizations still take place. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** biologist at the Port Erin Marine Station of the University of Liverpool (UK); Author, The Origins of Larvae - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Biologist, University of Liverpool; Author, The Origins of Larvae](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10787) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-077 — Philosopher of Art, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Editor, Arts & Letters Daily — Denis Dutton > Some unique works of art, for example, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, possess this rare but demonstrable capacity to excite the human mind across cultural boundaries and through historic time. I cannot prove it, but I think a small body of such works—by Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Murasaki Shikibu, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Wagner, Jane Austen, Sophocles, Hokusai—will be sought after and enjoyed for centuries or millennia into the future. As much as fashions and philosophies are bound to change, these works will remain objects of permanent value to human beings. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily; Author, The Art Instinct - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Philosopher of Art, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Editor, Arts & Letters Daily](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10944) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-078 — Money Manager and Science Philanthropist — Unattributed Edge contributor > The great breakthrough will involve a new understanding of time...that moving through time is not free, and that consciousness itself will be seen to only be a time sensor, adding to the other sensors of light and space. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 38 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Money Manager and Science Philanthropist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11101) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-079 — Quantum Mechanical Engineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Seth Lloyd > I cannot prove that electrons exist, but I believe fervently in their existence. And if you don't believe in them, I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 41 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Quantum Mechanical Engineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10801) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-080 — Psychologist, Hope College; Author, Intuition — David G. Myers > Within psychology, this "ever-reforming" process has many times changed my mind, leading me now to believe, for example, that newborns are not so dumb, that electro convulsive therapy often alleviates intractable depression, that America's economic growth has not improved our morale, that the automatic unconscious mind dwarfs the conscious mind, that traumatic experiences rarely get repressed, that most folks don't suffer low self-esteem, and that sexual orientation is not a choice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Hope College; Author, Intuition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10958) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-081 — Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > As to the future, I will follow the cautious weather forecaster who announces: "Tomorrow will be a beautiful day, unless it rains." In other words, I can see all sorts of potentially wonderful developments in human consciousness, global solidarity, knowledge and ethics; however, there are about as many trends operating towards opposite outcomes: a coarsening of taste, reduction to least common denominator, polarization of property, power, and faith. I hope we will have the time and opportunity to understand which policies lead to which outcomes, and then that we will have the motivation and the courage to implement the more desirable alternatives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11116) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-082 — Biological Mathematician, Harvard University; Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics — Martin Nowak > Important steps in evolution are robust. Multi-cellularity evolved at least ten times. There are several independent origins of eusociality. There were a number of lineages leading from primates to humans. If our ancestors would not have evolved language, somebody else would have. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology and Mathematics, Harvard University; Co-author, SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 42 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Biological Mathematician, Harvard University; Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10815) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-083 — Editor of Release 1.0; Trustee, Long Now Foundation; Author, Release 2.0 — Esther Dyson > Whatever's happening to adults, most of us grew up reading books (at least occasionally) and playing with "uninteractive" toys that required us to make up our own stories, dialogue and behavior for them. Today's children are living in an information-rich, time-compressed environment that often seems to replace a child's imagination rather than stimulate it. I posit that being fed so much processed information—video, audio, images, flashing screens, talking toys, simulated action games—is akin to being fed too much processed, sugar-rich food. It may seriously mess up children's information metabolism and their ability to process information for themselves. In other words, will they be able to discern cause and effect, to put together a coherent story line, to think scientifically? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Editor of Release 1.0; Trustee, Long Now Foundation; Author, Release 2.0](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10972) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-084 — Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity — Lee Smolin > Putting these together, we see that quantum uncertainty must be a residue of the resulting non-locality, which restricts our ability to predict the future of any small region of the universe. Hbar, the fundamental constant of quantum mechanics that measures the quantum uncertainty, is related to N, the number of degrees of freedom in the universe. A reasonable conjecture is that hbar is proportional to the inverse of the square root of N. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11130) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-085 — Biologist; Climatologist, Stanford University; Author, Laboratory Earth — Stephen Schneider > What is "proof"? In the strict old fashioned frequentist statistical belief system data is direct observations of the hypothesized phenomena—temperature increases in my case—and when you get enough of it to produce frequency distributions you can assign objective probabilities to cause and effect hypotheses. But what if the events cannot be precisely measured, or worse, apply to future events like the warming of the late 21st century? Then a frequentist interpretation of " proof" is impossible in principle before the fact, and we instead become subjectivists—Bayesian updaters as some statisticians like to refer to it. In this case we use frequency data and all other data relevant to components of our analysis to form a "prior"—a belief about likelihood of an event or process. Then as we learn more we update our belief—an "a posteriori probability" as the Bayesians call it—or simply a revised prior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 145 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Biologist; Climatologist, Stanford University; Author, Laboratory Earth](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10433) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-086 — Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs — Howard Rheingold > Although new knowledge in biology about the evolution of altruistic behavior and the role of symbiotic relationships, new understandings of economic behavior derived from experiments in game theory, neuroeconomic research, sociological investigations of institutions for collective action, computation-enabled technologies such as grid computing, mesh networks, and online markets all provide important clues, I don't believe anyone is likely to formulate an algorithm or recipe for human cooperation. I suspect that the complex interdependencies of human thought, behavior and culture entails an equivalent to the limits Heisenberg found to physics and Gödel established for mathematics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10549) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-087 — Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Media Virus — Douglas Rushkoff > Theology goes a long way towards imbuing substance and processes with meaning—describing life as "matter reaching towards divinity," or as the process through which divinity calls matter back up into itself—but theologians repeatedly make the mistake of ascribing this sense of purpose to history rather than the future. This is only natural, since the narrative structures we use to understand our world tend to have beginnings, middles, and ends. In order to experience the pay-off at the end of the story, we need to see it as somehow built-in to the original intention of events. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Media Virus](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10691) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-088 — Biologist, Schumacher College, Devon, UK; Author, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots — Brian Goodwin > Understanding species as cultures that have experienced 3.7 billion years of adaptive evolution on earth makes it clear that they are repositories of meaningful knowledge and experience about effective living that we urgently need to learn about in human culture. Here is a source of deep wisdom about living in participation with others that is energy and resource efficient, that recycles everything, produces forms that are simultaneously functional and beautiful, and is continuously innovative and creative. We can now proceed with a holistic science that is unified with the arts and humanities and has at its foundation the principles that arise from a naturalistic ethic based on an extended science that includes qualities as well as quantities within the domain of knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Biologist, Schumacher College, Devon, UK; Author, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10442) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-089 — Ophthalmologist and Neurobiologist, University of California, Davis — Leo M. Chalupa > When the scientific endeavor is considered in relation to the obvious limitations of the human brain, the knowledge we have gained in all fields to date is astonishing. Consider the well-documented variability in the functional properties of neurons. When recordings are made from a single cell—for instance in the visual cortex to a flashing spot of light—one can't help but be amazed by the trial-to-trial variations in the resulting responses. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Ophthalmologist and Neurobiologist, University of California, Davis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10560) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-090 — Novelist; Author, Saturday — Ian McEwan > What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given—true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Novelist; Recipient, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Author, Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; The Cockroach - **Extract length:** 138 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Novelist; Author, Saturday](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10354) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-091 — Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Infinity and the Mind — Rudy Rucker > The Metaphysics rule is...what? One possibility is that it's something quite simple, perhaps as simple as an eight-bit cellular automaton rule generating complex-looking patterns out of pure computation. Or perhaps the Metaphysics rule is like the mind of an author creating a novel, searching out the best word to write next, somehow peering into alternate realities. Or, yet again, the big Metaphysics rule in the sky could be the One cosmic mind, the Big Aha, the eternal secret, living in the spaces between your thoughts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Infinity and the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10705) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-092 — Computational Neuroscientist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Coauthor, The Computational Brain — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Textbooks in neuroscience, including one that I coauthored, say that memories are stored at synapses between neurons in the brain, of which there are many. In neural network models of memory, information can be stored by selectively altering the strengths of the synapses, and "spike-time dependent plasticity" at synapses in the cerebral cortex has been found with these properties. This is a hot area of research, but all we need to know here is that patterns of neural activity can indeed modify a lot of molecular machinery inside a neuron. - **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:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Computational Neuroscientist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Coauthor, The Computational Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10451) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-093 — Physicist; Institut Universitaire de France & University of the Mediterraneum; Author, Quantum Gravity — Carlo Rovelli > I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality. - **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:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Physicist; Institut Universitaire de France & University of the Mediterraneum; Author, Quantum Gravity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10572) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-094 — Evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University; Author, Natural Selection and Social Theory — Robert Trivers > I believe that deceit and self deception play a disproportinate role in human-generated disasters, including misguided wars, international affairs more gnerally, the collapse of civilizations, and state affairs, including disastrous social, political and economic policies and miscarriages of justice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University; Author, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist - **Extract length:** 39 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University; Author, Natural Selection and Social Theory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10362) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-095 — Biologist, London; Author of The Presence of the Past — Rupert Sheldrake > Others may prefer to dispense with the idea of fields and explain the evolution of organization in some other way, perhaps using more general terms like "emergent systems properties". But whatever the details of the models, I believe that the natural selection of habits will play an essential part in any integrated theory of evolution, including not just biological evolution, but also physical, chemical, cosmic, social, mental and cultural evolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** biologist and author - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Biologist, London; Author of The Presence of the Past](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10719) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-096 — Physicist; Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University — Alexander Vilenkin > If so, it contains an infinite number of regions of the same size as our observable region (which is 80 billion light years across). It follows from quantum mechanics that the number of distinct histories that could occur in any of these finite regions in a finite time (since the big bang) is finite. By history I mean not just the history of the civilization, but everything that happens, down to the atomic level. The number of possible histories is fantastically large (it has been estimated as 10 to the power 10 to the power 150), but the important point is that it is finite. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Physicist; Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10462) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-097 — Computer Scientist; Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University — John Mccarthy > I think, as did Gödel, that the continuum hypothesis is false. No-one will ever prove it false from the presently accepted axioms of set theory. Chris Freiling's proposed new (1986) axioms prove it false, but they are not regarded as intuitive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University - **Extract length:** 41 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist; Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10583) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-098 — Biologist; Cloning Researcher; Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; Coauthor, The Second Creation — Ian Wilmut > The birth of Dolly provided the insight behind this belief. She was the first adult cloned from another adult, of any species. Previously biologists had believed that the mechanisms that direct the formation of all of the different tissues that make up an adult were so complex and so rigidly fixed that they could not be reversed. Her birth demonstrated that the mechanisms that were active in the nucleus transferred from the mammary epithelial cell could be reversed by unknown factors in the recipient unfertilised egg. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Reproductive Biology, Director Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Author, After Dolly - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Biologist; Cloning Researcher; Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; Coauthor, The Second Creation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10371) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-099 — Archaeologist; Journalist; Writer-in-Residence, University of Bradford; Author, Past Poetic — Christine Finn > I have a belief that modern humans are greatly underutilizing their cognitive capabilities. Finding proof of this, however, would lie in embracing those very same sentient possibilities—visceral hunches—which were possibly part of the world of archaic humans. This enlarged realm of the senses acknowledges reason, but also heeds the grip of the gut, the body poetic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Archaeologist; Journalist; Writer-in-Residence, University of Bradford; Author, Past Poetic](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10731) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-100 — Writer; Contributing Editor, Wired, Newsweek International; Author, Mapping Mars. — Oliver Morton > If I can't prove this, why do I believe it? Because it's better than believing the alternative. Because it provides a context for social and political action that would otherwise be futile; in this, it is an exhortatory belief. It is also, in part, a self-serving one, in that it suggests that by trying to clarify and disseminate knowledge (a description that makes me sound like the chef at a soup kitchen) I'm doing something that helps the better future, if only a bit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief News and Features Editor - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Writer; Contributing Editor, Wired, Newsweek International; Author, Mapping Mars.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10472) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-101 — Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word — James J. O'Donnell > The problem with such a notion is, of course, that we are very far from being able to outline such a theory, much less make it persuasive, much less make it something that another human being could comprehend. Understanding even one other person's life at such microscopic detail would take much more than one lifetime. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10595) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-102 — Physicist — Anton Zeilinger > I feel that this is the message of the quantum. It is the natural extension of the Copenhagen interpretation. Once you adopt the notion that reality and information are the same all quantum paradoxes and puzzles disappear, like the measurement problem or Schrödinger's cat. Yet the price to pay is high. If my hypothesis is true, many questions become meaningless. There is no sense then to ask, what is "really" going on out there. Schrödinger's cat is neither dead nor alive unless we obtain information about her state. - **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:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Physicist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10380) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-103 — Philosopher and Psychologist, New York University — Ned Block > I believe that the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" will be solved by conceptual advances made in connection with cognitive neuroscience. Let me explain. No one has a clue (at the moment) how to answer the question of why the neural basis of the phenomenal feel of my experience of red is the neural basis of that phenomenal feel rather than a different one or none at all. There is an "explanatory gap" here which no one has a clue how to close. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, Neural Science, NYU - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Philosopher and Psychologist, New York University](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10745) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-104 — Albert Einstein Professor of Physics, Princeton University. — Paul J. Steinhardt > I find the desperation especially unwarranted since I see no evidence that our universe arose by a random process. Quite the contrary, recent observations and experiments suggest that our universe is extremely simple. The distribution of matter and energy is remarkably uniform. The hierarchy of complex structures ranging from galaxy clusters to subnuclear particles can all be described in terms of a few dozen elementary constituents and less than a handful of forces, all related by simple symmetries. A simple universe demands a simple explanation. Why do we need to postulate an infinite number of universes with all sorts of different properties just to explain our one? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Albert Einstein Professor of Physics, Princeton University.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10483) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-105 — Writer; Author, Machines Who Think — Pamela McCorduck > Although I can't prove it, I believe that thanks to new kinds of social modeling, that take into account individual motives as well as group goals, we will soon grasp in a deep way how collective human behavior works, whether it's action by small groups or by nations. Any predictive power this understanding has will be useful, especially with regard to unexpected outcomes and even unintended consequences. But it will not be infallible, because the complexity of such behavior makes exact prediction impossible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Machines Who Think, The Universal Machine, Bounded Rationality, This Could Be Important; Co-author (with Edward Feigenbaum), The Fifth Generation - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Writer; Author, Machines Who Think](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10608) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-106 — Biologist; Geographer, UCLA; Author, Collapse — Jared Diamond > Every year, beginning graduate students in archaeology and paleontology, working in Africa or Europe or Asia, go out and discover undisputed new sites with ancient human presence. Every year, new such discoveries are announced to the other three continents, but none has ever met the requirements of evidence accepted for Africa, Europe, or Asia. The big animals of the latter three continents survive, because they had millions of years to learn fear of human hunters with very slowly evolving skills; most big animals of the former three continents didn't survive, because they had the misfortune that their first encounter with humans was a sudden one, with fully modern skilled hunters. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Biologist; Geographer, UCLA; Author, Collapse](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10389) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-107 — Psychologist, Boston College; Author, Gifted Children — Ellen Winner > Another problem with only using personality tests to examine parental influence is that these tests ignore political, social, and moral values and aesthetic tastes. I believe that children end up with much of their parents' values and tastes. We know that one of the best predictors of how people vote is how their parents vote. Parental values such as generosity, ambition, materialism, anti-materialism, etc have powerful effects on children. True, children may react against their parents' values. Materialistic parents have bred hippie children. But how many of these children eventually shed their hippie clothing and go to Wall Street? All too many. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, Boston College; Author, How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychologist, Boston College; Author, Gifted Children](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10494) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-108 — Cosmologist, Cambridge University; UK Astronomer Royal; Author, Our Final Hour — Martin Rees > There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be around in 6 billion years, watching the Sun flare up and die. But the forms of life and intelligence that have by then emerged would surely be as different from us as we are from a bacterium. That conclusion would follow even if future evolution proceeded at the rate at which new species have emerged over the 3 or 4 billion years of the geological past. But post-human evolution (whether of organic species or of artefacts) will proceed far faster than the changes that led to emergence, because it will be intelligently directed rather than being—like pre-human evolution—the gradual outcome of Darwinian natural selection. Changes will drastically accelerate in the present century—through intentional genetic modifications, targeted drugs, perhaps even silicon implants in to the brain. Humanity may not persist as a single species for more than a few centuries—especially if communities have by then become established away from the earth. - **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:** 160 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Cosmologist, Cambridge University; UK Astronomer Royal; Author, Our Final Hour](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10620) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-109 — Psychologist; Author, Emotional Intelligence — Daniel Goleman > We know that the prefrontal-limbic neural circuitry crucial for social and emotional abilities is the last part of the human brain to become anatomically mature, not finishing this developmental task until the mid-20s. During that window, children's life abilities become set as neurons come online and are interconnected for better or for worse. A child's experiences dictate how those connections are made. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Psychologist; Author, Emotional Intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10398) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-110 — Mathematician, Yale University; Author, The Fractal Geometry of Nature — Benoit Mandelbrot > A few of the truths the eye told me have been disproven. Let it be. Others have been confirmed by enormous and fruitful effort, and then blossomed, one being the four thirds conjecture in Brownian motion. Many others remain, one being the MLC conjecture about the Mandelbrot set, in which I believe for no other reason than trust in the eye. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Yale University; IBM Fellow Emeritus (Physics) at the IBM; author, The Fractalist; Memoir of a Scientific Maverick - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Mathematician, Yale University; Author, The Fractal Geometry of Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10505) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-111 — Planetary Scientist; Leader, Cassini Imaging Team; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder — Carolyn Porco > Evidence is gathering that the events that created the solar system and the Earth, driven predominantly by gravity, are common and pervasive in our galaxy and, by inductive reasoning, in galaxies throughout the cosmos. The cosmos is very, very big. Consider the overwhelming numbers of galaxies in the visible cosmos alone and all the Sun-like stars in those galaxies and the number of habitable planets likely to be orbiting those stars and the ease with which life developed on our own habitable planet, and it becomes increasingly unavoidable that life is itself a fundamental feature of our universe ... along with dark matter, supernovae, and black holes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Team Leader; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Planetary Scientist; Leader, Cassini Imaging Team; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10634) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-112 — Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information Management & Systems — Marti Hearst > Of course, another important development is the rise of the Web and its most voracious consumer, the internet search engine. It is common knowledge that search engines make use of information associated with link structure to improve results rankings. But search engine companies also have enormous, albeit somewhat impoverished, repositories of information about how people ask for information. This behavioral information can be used to build better search tools. For example, some spelling correction algorithms make use of how people have corrected erroneous spellings in the past, by observing pairs of queries that occur one after the next. The second query is assumed to be the correction, if it is sufficiently similar to the first. Patterns are then derived that convert from different types of misspellings to their corrections. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information Management & Systems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10406) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-113 — Cognitive Neuropsychology Researcher, Institut National de la Santé, Paris; Author, The Number Sense — Stanislas Dehaene > Once the internal connectivity of a system exceeds a threshold, it begins to be dominated by self-sustained, reverberating states of activity. I believe that the human workspace system has passed this threshold, and has gained a considerable autonomy relative to the outside world. The human brain is much less at the mercy of signals from the outside world. Its activity never ceases to reverberate from area to area, thus generating a highly structured spontaneous flow of thoughts that we project on the outside world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Cognitive Neuropsychology Researcher, Institut National de la Santé, Paris; Author, The Number Sense](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10516) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-114 — Computer Scientist; Founder, Intentional Software; formerly Chief Architect, Microsoft — Charles Simonyi > What can be done? Follow the metaphor. First, refocus on recording the problem statement—the "cleartext" in our metaphor. This is not a program in any sense of the word—it is just a straightforward recording of the subject matter experts' contributions using their own terms-of-art, their jargon, their own notations. Next, empower the programmers to program not the problem itself, but to express their software engineering expertise and decisions as a computer code for the encoder that takes the recorded problem statement and generates the code from it. This is called generative programming and I believe it is the future of software. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist; Founder, Intentional Software; formerly Chief Architect, Microsoft](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10649) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-115 — Archaeologist, University of Bradford; Author, The Buried Soul — Timothy Taylor > "All your life you live so close to the truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque" wrote Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Something I believe is true even though I cannot prove it, is that both cannibalism and slavery were prevalent in human prehistory. Neither belief commands specialist academic consensus and each phenomenon remains highly controversial, their empirical "signatures" in the archaeological record being ambiguous and fugitive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Archaeologist, University of Bradford; Author, The Buried Soul](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10415) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-116 — Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The User Illusion — Tor Nørretranders > Recent discoveries in behavioural sciences, such as experimental economics and game theory, shows that it is a common human attitude towards the world to have faith. It is vital in human interactions; and it is no coincidence that the importance of anchoring behaviour in riskful trust is stressed in worlds as far apart as Søren Kierkegaard's existentialist christianity and modern theories of bargaining behaviour in economic interactions. Both stress the importance of the inner, subjective conviction as the basis for actions, the feeling of an inner glow. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The User Illusion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10527) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-117 — Editor-In-Chief, Wired — Christopher J. Anderson > The Intelligent Design movement has opened my eyes. I realize that although I believe that evolution explains why the living world is the way it is, I can't actually prove it. At least not to the satisfaction of the ID folk, who seem to require that every example of extraordinary complexity and clever plumbing in nature be fully traced back (not just traceable back) along an evolutionary tree to prove that it wasn't directed by an invisible hand. If the scientific community won't do that, then the arguments goes that they must accept a large red "theory" stamp placed on the evolution textbooks and that alternative theories, such as "guided" evolution and creationism, be taught alongside. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, TED conferences, TED Talks; author, TED Talks - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Editor-In-Chief, Wired](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10663) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-118 — Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; Coauthor, Why We Get Sick — Randolph Nesse > Like nearly every other trait, tendencies for passionate emotions and irrational convictions are most advantageous in some middle range. The optimum for modern life seems to me to be quite a ways towards the rational side of the median, but there are advantages and disadvantages at every point along the spectrum. Making human life better requires that we understand these capacities, and to do that we must seek their origins and functions. I cannot prove this is true, but I believe it is. This belief spurs my search for evidence which will either strengthen my conviction or, if I can discipline my mind sufficiently, convince me that it is false. - **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:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; Coauthor, Why We Get Sick](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10424) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-119 — Theoretical Physicist, University of California, Santa Barbara — Steve Giddings > On the first point, I am far from alone; many string theorists and others now believe that black holes don't destroy information, and thus don't violate quantum mechanics. Hawking himself recently announced that he believes this, and has conceded a famous bet, but has not yet published the work giving a sharp statement where his original logic went wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Theoretical Physicist, University of California, Santa Barbara](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10538) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2005-120 — Mathematician, Emeritus Professor, Dept of Philosophy, University of Calgary; Author, Gödel's Theorems — Verena Huber-Dyson > Most of what I believe I cannot prove, simply for lack of time and energy; truths that I'd claim to know because they have been proved by others. That is how inextricably our beliefs are tied up with labors accomplished by fellow beings. And then there are mathematical truths that we now know are not provable. These phenomena have become favorites with the media but can only be made sense of by a serious scrutiny of the idea of mathematical truth and a specific articulation of a proof-concept, - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** 1923-2016; Emeritus Professor, Formerly, Philosophy Department. University of Calgary, Alberta Canada - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Mathematician, Emeritus Professor, Dept of Philosophy, University of Calgary; Author, Gödel's Theorems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10677) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted