# Edge 2006 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-is-your-dangerous-idea) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-dangerous-idea) - **Archive year:** 2006 - **Response rows represented:** 118 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 118 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 8 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 8 - **Not yet promoted:** 110 ## 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 ### EDGE2006-001 — The Evolution of Evil — David M. Buss > The idea that evil has evolved is dangerous on several counts. If our brains contain psychological circuits that can trigger murder, genocide, and other forms of malevolence, then perhaps we can't hold those who commit carnage responsible: "It's not my client's fault, your honor, his evolved homicide adaptations made him do it." Understanding causality, however, does not exonerate murderers, whether the tributaries trace back to human evolution history or to modern exposure to alcoholic mothers, violent fathers, or the ills of bullying, poverty, drugs, or computer games. It would be dangerous if the theory of the evolved murderous mind were misused to let killers free. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Evolution of Evil](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11925) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-002 — Francis Crick's — Vilayanur Ramachandran > An idea that would be "dangerous if true" is what Francis Crick referred to as "the astonishing hypothesis"; the notion that our conscious experience and sense of self is based entirely on the activity of a hundred billion bits of jelly—the neurons that constitute the brain. We take this for granted in these enlightened times, but even so, it never ceases to amaze me. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor & Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, UC, San Diego; Author, The Tell-Tale Brain - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Francis Crick's](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11940) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-003 — A 24-hour period of absolute solitude — Leo M. Chalupa > My dangerous idea is that what's needed to attain optimal brain performance — with or without prior brain exercise — is a 24-hour period of absolute solitude. By absolute solitude I mean no verbal interactions of any kind (written or spoken, live or recorded) with another human being. I would venture that a significantly higher proportion of people reading these words have tried skydiving than experienced one day of absolute solitude. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [A 24-hour period of absolute solitude](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11956) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-004 — Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts — J. Craig Venter > For example, we know from experiments on fruit flies that there are genes that control many behaviors, including sexual activity. We sequenced the dog genome a couple of years ago and now an additional breed has had its genome decoded. The canine world offers a unique look into the genetic basis of behavior. The large number of distinct dog breeds originated from the wolf genome by selective breeding, yet each breed retains only subsets of the wolf behavior spectrum. We know that there is a genetic basis not only of the appearance of the breeds with 30-fold difference in weight and 6-fold in height but in their inherited actions. For example border collies can use the power of their stare to herd sheep instead of freezing them in place prior to devouring them. - **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:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11972) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-005 — Science may be 'running out of control' — Martin Rees > Cynics would go further, and say that anything that is scientifically and technically possible will be done — somewhere, sometime — despite ethical and prudential objections, and whatever the regulatory regime. Whether this idea is true or false, it's an exceedingly dangerous one, because it's engenders despairing pessimism, and demotivates efforts to secure a safer and fairer world. The future will best be safeguarded — and science has the best chance of being applied optimally — through the efforts of people who are less fatalistic. - **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:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science may be 'running out of control'](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11987) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-006 — Hodgepodge Morality — David Pizarro > Discarding the belief that our moral sense provides a royal road to moral truth is an uncomfortable notion. Most people, after all, are moral realists. They believe acts are objectively right or wrong, like math problems. The dangerous idea is that our intuitions may be poor guides to moral truth, and can easily lead us astray in our everyday moral decisions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Hodgepodge Morality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11745) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-007 — There are no souls — Paul Bloom > "If science did show that all human acts, including conceptual thought and free choice, are just brain processes,... it would mean that the difference between human beings and other animals is only superficial-a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind; it would mean that human beings lack any special dignity worthy of special respect. Thus, it would undermine the norms that forbid killing and eating human beings as we kill and eat chickens, or enslaving them and treating them as beasts of burden as we do horses or oxen." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [There are no souls](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11910) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-008 — The fight against global warming is lost — Paul Davies > The idea of giving up the global warming struggle is dangerous because it shouldn't have come to this. Mankind does have the resources and the technology to cut greenhouse gas emission. What we lack is the political will. People pay lip service to environmental responsibility, but they are rarely prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Global warming may turn out to be not so bad after all, but many other acts of environmental vandalism are manifestly reckless: the depletion of the ozone layer, the destruction of rain forests, the pollution of the oceans. Giving up on global warming will set an ugly precedent. - **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:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The fight against global warming is lost](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11595) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-009 — Unspeakable Ideas — Randolph Nesse > Many broader truths are equally unspeakable. Consider, for instance, all the articles written about leadership. Most are infused with admiration and respect for a leader's greatness. Much rarer are articles about the tendency for leadership positions to be attained by power-hungry men who use their influence to further advance their self-interest. Then there are all the writings about sex and marriage. Most of them suggest that there is some solution that allows full satisfaction for both partners while maintaining secure relationships. Questioning such notions is dangerous, unless you are a comic, in which case skepticism can be very, very funny. - **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:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Unspeakable Ideas](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11760) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-010 — If patterns of human love subtlely change, all sorts of social and political atrocities can escalate — Helen Fisher > I believe that Homo sapiens has evolved (at least) three primary, distinct yet overlapping neural systems for reproduction. The sex drive evolved to motivate ancestral men and women to seek sexual union with a range of partners; romantic love evolved to enable them to focus their courtship energy on a preferred mate, thereby conserving mating time and energy; attachment evolved to enable them to rear a child through infancy together. The complex and dynamic interactions between these three brain systems suggest that any medication that changes their chemical checks and balances is likely to alter an individual's courting, mating and parenting tactics, ultimately affecting their fertility and genetic future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [If patterns of human love subtlely change, all sorts of social and political atrocities can escalate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11610) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-011 — Think outside the Kyoto box — Gregory Benford > Very little, compared with how much we worry about it. The corn standing as high as an elephant's eye all around you holds four hundred times as much carbon as there is in man-made carbon dioxide — our villain — in the entire column reaching to the top of the atmosphere. (We have added a few hundred parts per million to our air by burning.) Inevitably, we must understand and control the atmosphere, as part of a grand imperative of directing the entire global ecology. Yearly, we manage through agriculture far more carbon than is causing our greenhouse dilemma. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Think outside the Kyoto box](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11774) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-012 — Suppose Faulkner was right? — Joel Garreau > Some would have you believe that a future in which our creations eliminate the ills that have plagued mankind for millennia — conquering pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance and even death — is a vision of heaven. Some even welcome the idea that someday soon, our creations will surpass the pitiful limitations of Version 1.0 humans, themselves becoming a successor race that will conquer the universe, and care for us benevolently. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal, The Garreau Group - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Suppose Faulkner was right?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11625) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-013 — Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence: The Problem With Super Mirrors — Marco Iacoboni > Some years ago, when we still were a very small group of neuroscientists studying mirror neurons and we were just starting investigating the role of mirror neurons in intention understanding, we discussed the possibility of super mirror neurons. After all, if you have such a powerful neural system in your brain, you also want to have some control or modulatory neural mechanisms. We have now preliminary evidence suggesting that some prefrontal areas have super mirrors. I think super mirrors come in at least two flavors. One is inhibition of overt mirroring, and the other one — the one that might explain why we imitate violent behavior, which require a fairly complex sequence of motor acts — is mirroring of sequences of motor actions. Super mirror mechanisms may provide a fairly detailed explanation of imitative violence after being exposed to media violence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People - **Extract length:** 141 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence: The Problem With Super Mirrors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11789) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-014 — Touching and pushing the limits of the human brain — Stanislas Dehaene > As we discover the limits of the human brain, we also find new ways to design machines that go beyond those limits. Thus, we have to get ready for a society where, more and more, the human mind will be replaced by better computers and robots — and where the human operator will be increasingly considered a nuisance rather than an asset. This is already the case in aeronautics, where flight stability is ensured by fast cybernetics and where landing and take off will soon be assured by computer, apparently with much improved safety. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Touching and pushing the limits of the human brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11640) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Brain Interfaces May Divide Humanity Into High-Tech and Low-Tech Minds by Stanislas Dehaene|Brain Interfaces May Divide Humanity Into High-Tech and Low-Tech Minds by Stanislas Dehaene]] ### EDGE2006-015 — What We Know May Not Change Us — Barry C. Smith > Theories at these different levels may not be reduced one to another. What matters is that they be compatible with one another. The astronomy Newton gave us was a triumph over supernaturalism because it united the mechanics of the sub-lunary world with an account of the heavenly bodies. In a similar way, biology allowed us to advance from a time when we saw life in terms of an elan vital. Today, the biggest challenge is to explain our powers of thinking and imagination, our abilities to represent and report our thoughts: the very means by which we engage in scientific theorising. The final triumph of the natural sciences over supernaturalism will be an account of nature of conscious experience. The cognitive and brain sciences have done much to make that project clearer but we are still a long way from a fully satisfying theory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor & Director, Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London - **Extract length:** 144 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [What We Know May Not Change Us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11805) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-016 — The unknown becomes known, and is not replaced with a new unkown — Eric Fischl > Vermeer puts me into what had been her condition of uncertainty. All I can do is wonder and wait. This makes me think about how not knowing is so important. Not knowing makes the world large and uncertain and our survival tenuous. It is a mystery why humans roam and still more a mystery why we still need to feel so connected to the place we have left. The not knowing causes such profound anxiety it, in turn, spawns creativity. The impetus for this creativity is empowerment. Our gadgets, gizmoes, networks of transportation and communication, have all been developed either to explore, utilize or master the unknown territory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visual Artists - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The unknown becomes known, and is not replaced with a new unkown](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11655) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-017 — Dark Energy might not exist — Philip W. Anderson > Well, now, imagine how big the parameter space is for God. He could have a long gray beard or not, be benevolent or malicious in a lot of different ways and over a wide range of values, he can have a variety of views on abortion, contraception, like or abominate human images, like or abominate music, and the range of dietary prejudices He has been credited with is as long as your arm. There is the heaven-hell dimension, the one vs three question, and I haven't even mentioned polytheism. I think there are certainly as many parameters as sects, or more. If there is even a sliver of prior probability for the null hypothesis, the posterior probability of any particular God is pretty small. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Dark Energy might not exist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11820) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-018 — It is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true — Nicholas Humphrey > Bertrand Russell's idea, put forward 80 years ago, is about as dangerous as they come. I don't think I can better it: "I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." (The opening lines of his Sceptical essays). - **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:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [It is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11669) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-019 — The human brain is a cultural artefact. — Timothy Taylor > From this point onwards it is not hard to see how a distinctively human culture emerges through the extra-uterine formation of higher cognitive capacities — the phylogenetic and ontogenic icing on the cake of primate brain function. The child, carried by the parent into social situations, watches vocalization. Parental selection for smart features such as an ability to babble early may well, as others have suggested, have driven the brain size increases until 250,000 years ago — a point when the final bio-mechanical limits of big-headed mammals with narrow pelvises were reached by two species: Neanderthals and us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The human brain is a cultural artefact.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11835) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Identity/The Brain Goes Beyond Nature Through External Memory by Timothy Taylor|The Brain Goes Beyond Nature Through External Memory by Timothy Taylor]] ### EDGE2006-020 — The hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true — David Bodanis > There's another sort of inertia that's coming to an end as well. The first generation of immigrants from farm to city bring with them the attitudes of their farm world; the first generation of 'migrants' from blue collar city neighborhoods to upper middle class professional life bring similar attitudes of responsibility as well. We ignore what the media pours out about how we're supposed to live. We're responsible for parents, even when it's not to our economic advantage; we vote against our short-term economic interests, because it's the 'right' thing to do; we engage in philanthropy towards individuals of very different backgrounds from ourselves. But why? In many parts of America or Europe, the rules and habits creating those attitudes no longer exist at all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Futurist; Author, Einstein's Greatest Mistake - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11685) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-021 — Our planet is not in peril — Oliver Morton > Rolling carbon/climate issues into the great moral imperative of improving the lives of the poor, rather than relegating them to the dodgy rhetorical level of a threat to the planet as a whole, seems more likely to be a sustainable long-term strategy. The most important thing about environmental change is that it hurts people; the basis of our response should be human solidarity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief News and Features Editor - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Our planet is not in peril](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11849) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-022 — Using Medications To Change Personality — Samuel Barondes > In the past few decades certain psychiatric medications have become an additional tool for those seeking control of their lives. Initially designed to be used for a few months to treat episodic psychological disturbances such as severe depression, they are now being widely prescribed for indefinite use to produce sustained shifts in certain personality traits. Prozac is the best known of them, but many others are on the market or in development. By directly affecting brain circuits that control emotions, these medications can produce desirable effects that may be hard to replicate by sheer force of will or by behavioral exercises. Millions keep taking them continuously, year after year, to modulate personality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Using Medications To Change Personality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11700) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-023 — A New Golden Age of Medicine — Paul W. Ewald > The process of acceptance typically occurs over one or more decades and accords with Schopenhauer's generalization about the establishment of truth: it is first ridiculed, then violently opposed, and finally accepted as being self-evident. Just a few groups of pathogens seem to be big players: streptococci, Chlamydia, some bacteria of the oral cavity, hepatitis viruses, and herpes viruses. If the correlations between these pathogens and the big diseases of wealthy countries does in fact reflect infectious causation, effective vaccines against these pathogens could contribute in a big way to a new golden age of medicine that could rival the first half of the 20th century. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A New Golden Age of Medicine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11864) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-024 — Most bell curves have thick tails — Bart Kosko > My colleagues and I have recently shown that most mathematical models of spiking neurons in the retina can not only benefit from small amounts of added noise by increasing their Shannon bit count but they still continue to benefit from added thick-tailed or "infinite-variance" noise. The same result holds experimentally for a carbon nanotube transistor that detects signals in the presence of added electrical noise. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Most bell curves have thick tails](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11715) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-025 — Science will never silence God — Jesse Bering > As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God, but ultimately this is like cutting off our ears to hear more clearly. God too is a biological appendage; until we acknowledge this fact for what it is, until we rear our children with this knowledge, he will continue to howl his discontent for all of time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Associate Professor, Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand; Author, Perv - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science will never silence God](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11879) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-026 — Education as we know it does not accomplish what we believe it does — Jamshed Bharucha > At any given time we attend to only a tiny subset of the information in our brains or impinging on our senses. We know from research on attention that information is processed differently by the brain depending upon whether or not it is attended, and that many factors — endogenous and exogenous — control our attention. Educators have been aware of the role of attention in learning, but we are still far from understanding how to incorporate this knowledge into educational design. Moreover, new information presented in a learning situation is interpreted and encoded in terms of prior knowledge and experience; the increasingly diverse backgrounds of students placed in the same learning contexts implies that the same information may vary in its meaningfulness to different students and may be recalled differently. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; President Emeritus, Cooper Union - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Education as we know it does not accomplish what we believe it does](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11564) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-027 — Government is the problem not the solution — Matt Ridley > Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Government is the problem not the solution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11729) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-028 — Scientists and governments developing public engagement about science and technology are missing the point — Philip Campbell > This turns out to be true in cases where there are collapses in consensus that have serious societal consequences. Whether in relation to climate change, GM crops or the UK's triple vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, alternative science networks develop amongst people who are neither ignorant nor irrational, but have perceptions about science, the scientific literature and its implications that differ from those prevailing in the scientific community. These perceptions and discussions may be half-baked, but are no less powerful for all that, and carry influence on the internet and in the media. Researchers and governments haven't yet learned how to respond to such "citizen's science". Should they stop explaining and engaging? No. But they need also to understand better the influences at work within such networks — often too dismissively stereotyped — at an early stage in the debate in order to counter bad science and minimize the impacts of falsehoods. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines - **Extract length:** 153 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Scientists and governments developing public engagement about science and technology are missing the point](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11894) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-029 — The exact effect of art can't be controlled or fully anticipated — April Gornik > Great art makes itself vulnerable to interpretation, which is one reason that it keeps being stimulating and fascinating for generations. The problem inherent in this is that art could inspire malevolent behavior, as per the notion popularly expressed by A Clockwork Orange. When I was young, aspiring to be a conceptual artist, it disturbed me greatly that I couldn't control the interpretation of my work. When I began painting, it was even worse; even I wasn't completely sure of what my art meant. That seemed dangerous for me, personally, at that time. I gradually came not only to respect the complexity and inscrutability of painting and art, but to see how it empowers the object. I believe that works of art are animated by their creators, and remain able to generate thoughts, feelings, responses. However, the fact is that the exact effect of art can't be controlled or fully anticipated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visual Artists - **Extract length:** 150 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The exact effect of art can't be controlled or fully anticipated](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11579) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-030 — Bacteria are us — Lynn Margulis > What is my dangerous idea? Although arcane, evidence for this dangerous concept is overwhelming; I have collected clues from many sources. Reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's claim that "even true things can be proved" I predict that the scientific gatekeepers in academia eventually will be forced to permit this dangerous idea to become widely accepted. What is it? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Bacteria are us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11243) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-031 — What the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true — Carlo Rovelli > I think that seen from 200 years in the future, the dangerous scientific idea that was around at the beginning of the 20th century, and that everybody was afraid to accept, will simply be that the world is completely different from our simple minded picture of it. As the physics of the 20th century had already shown. - **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:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11431) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-032 — The genetic breakthrough that made people capable of ideas themselves — Seth Lloyd > The most dangerous idea is the genetic breakthrough that made people capable of ideas themselves. The idea of ideas is nice enough in principle; and ideas certainly have had their impact for good. But one of these days one of those nice ideas is likely to have the unintended consequence of destroying everything we know. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The genetic breakthrough that made people capable of ideas themselves](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11258) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-033 — Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an all too practical sense — Kai Krause > Now: I am no longer confident that line will continue. If every honeymoon is now booked in Bali on a Visa card, and every kid in Borneo wants to play ball in NYC... can the network of society be pliable enough to accommodate total upheaval? And what if 2 billion Chinese and Indians raise a generation of kids staring 6+ hours a day into All American values they can never attain... being taunted with Hollywood movies of heroic acts and pathetic dysfunctionality, coupled with ever increasing violence and disdain for ethics or morals. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an all too practical sense](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11445) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-034 — The Greatest Story Ever Told — Carolyn Porco > At the heart of every scientific inquiry is a deep spiritual quest — to grasp, to know, to feel connected through an understanding of the secrets of the natural world, to have a sense of one's part in the greater whole. It is this inchoate desire for connection to something greater and immortal, the need for elucidation of the meaning of the 'self', that motivates the religious to belief in a higher 'intelligence'. It is the allure of a bigger agency — outside the self but also involving, protecting, and celebrating the purpose of the self — that is the great attractor. Every culture has religion. It undoubtedly satisfies a manifest human need. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Team Leader; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Greatest Story Ever Told](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11273) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-035 — We shall understand the origin of life within the next 5 years — Robert Shapiro > Fortunately, an alternative solution to this dilemma has gradually emerged: neither DNA nor RNA nor protein were necessary for the origin of life. Large molecules dominate the processes of life today, but they were not needed to get it started. Monomers themselves have the ability to support heredity and catalysis. The key requirement is that a suitable energy source be available to assist them in the processes of self-organization. A demonstration of the principle involved in the origin of life would require only that a suitable monomer mixture be exposed to an appropriate energy source in a simple apparatus. We could then observe the very first steps in evolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Senior Research Scientist, New York University; Author, Planetary Dreams - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [We shall understand the origin of life within the next 5 years](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11460) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-036 — Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective — Michael Nesmith > Non-Objective establishes a continuum not to be confused with solipsism. As Schrödinger puts it when discussing the "time-hallowed discrimination between subject and object" — "the world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist". This continuum has large implications for the empirical data set, as it introduces factual infinity into the data plane. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11290) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-037 — Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox — Geoffrey Miller > The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness — subjective cues of survival and reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11475) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-038 — The world may fundamentally be inexplicable — Lawrence M. Krauss > The ultimate goal of physics, as it is often described, is to have a "theory of everything", in which all the fundamental laws that describe nature can neatly be written down on the front of a T-shirt (even if the T-shirt can only exist in 10 dimensions!). However, with the recognition that the dominant energy in the universe resides in empty space — something that is so peculiar that it appears very difficult to understand within the context of any theoretical ideas we now possess — more physicists have been exploring the idea that perhaps physics is an 'environmental science', that the laws of physics we observe are merely accidents of our circumstances, and that an infinite number of different universe could exist with different laws of physics. - **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:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The world may fundamentally be inexplicable](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11304) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-039 — My belief in science — Ernst Pöppel > Only now comes my dangerous idea as my (!) dangerous idea. It is not so difficult to come up with a dangerous scenario on a general level, but if one takes such a question also seriously on a personal level, one has to meditate an individual scenario. I am very grateful for this question formulated by Steven Pinker as it forced me to visit my episodic memory and to think about what has been and still is "my dangerous idea". Although nobody else might be interested in a personal statement, I say it anyway: My dangerous idea is my belief in science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [My belief in science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11490) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-040 — Democratizing access to the means of invention — Neil Gershenfeld > The ultimate consequence of the digitization of first communications, then computation, and now fabrication, is to democratize access to the means of invention. The third world can skip over the first and second cultures and go right to developing a third culture. Rather than today's model of researchers researching for researchees, the result of all that discovery has been to enable a planet of creators rather than consumers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Democratizing access to the means of invention](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11152) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-041 — There aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes — Daniel C. Dennett > If we don't drown, how will we cope? If we somehow learn to swim in the rising tide of the infosphere, that will entail that we–that is to say, our grandchildren and their grandchildren–become very very different from our recent ancestors. What will "we" be like? (Some years ago, Doug Hofstadter wrote a wonderful piece, " In 2093, Just Who Will Be We?" in which he imagines robots being created to have "human" values, robots that gradually take over the social roles of our biological descendants, who become stupider and less concerned with the things we value. If we could secure the welfare of just one of these groups, our children or our brainchildren, which group would we care about the most, with which group would we identify?) - **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:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [There aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11320) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-042 — Many behaviors of modern humans were genetically hard-wired (or soft-wired) in our distant ancestors by natural selection — Jerry A. Coyne > Second, as is well known, one can make consistency arguments for virtually every human behavior. Given the possibilities of kin selection (natural selection for behaviors that do no good for to their performers but are advantageous to their relatives) and reciprocal altruism, and our ignorance of the environments of our ancestors, there is no trait beyond evolutionary explanation. Indeed, there are claims for the evolutionary origin of even manifestly maladaptive behaviors, such as homosexuality, priestly celibacy, and extreme forms of altruism (e.g., self-sacrifice during wartime). But surely we cannot consider it scientifically proven that genes for homosexuality are maintained in human populations by kin selection. This remains possible but undemonstrated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author, Why Evolution is True; Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Many behaviors of modern humans were genetically hard-wired (or soft-wired) in our distant ancestors by natural selection](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11505) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-043 — The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas — W. Daniel Hillis > I don't share my most dangerous ideas. Ideas are the most powerful forces that we can unleash upon the world, and they should not be let loose without careful consideration of their consequences. Some ideas are dangerous because they are false, like an idea that one race of humans is more worthy that another, or that one religion has monopoly on the truth. False ideas like these spread like wildfire, and have caused immeasurable harm. They still do. Such false ideas should obviously not be spread or encouraged, but there are also plenty of trues idea that should not be spread: ideas about how to cause terror and pain and chaos, ideas of how to better convince people of things that are not true. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11167) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-044 — The idea that ideas can be dangerous — Daniel Gilbert > We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The idea that ideas can be dangerous](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11335) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-045 — A Science of the Divine? — Stephen M. Kosslyn > 4.3. According to this perspective, it's not just negotiating the physical world and sociocultural experience that shape the brain: The Ultimate Superset — the emergent property of all living things — affects all of the influences that "make us who and what we are," both as we develop during childhood and continue to learn and develop as adults. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [A Science of the Divine?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11520) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-046 — Homuncular Flexibility — Jaron Lanier > Homuncular flexibility isn't the only source of hints about how weird human experience might get in the future. There also questions related to language, memory, and other aspects of cognition, as well as hypothetical prospects for engineering changes in the brain. But in this one area, there's an indication of high weirdness to come, and I find that prospect dangerous, but in a beautiful and seductive way. "Thrilling" might be a better word. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Homuncular Flexibility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11182) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Identity/Human Experience May Become Beautifully Strange by Jaron Lanier|Human Experience May Become Beautifully Strange by Jaron Lanier]] ### EDGE2006-047 — The quick-thinking zombies inside us — Andy Clark > Of course, advertisers will say they have known this all along. But only in recent years, with seminal studies by Tanya Chartrand, John Bargh and others has the true scale of our daily automatism really begun to emerge. Such studies show that it is possible (it is relatively easy) to activate racist stereotypes that impact our subsequent behavioral interactions, for example yielding the judgment that your partner in a subsequent game or task is more hostile than would be judged by an unprimed control. Such effects occur despite a subject's total and honest disavowal of those very stereotypes. In similar ways it is possible to unconsciously prime us to feel older (and then we walk more slowly). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The quick-thinking zombies inside us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11352) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-048 — Technology can untie the U.S. — Juan Enriquez > Sooner or later we could witness some very bitter arguments about who gets and who pays. In developed country after developed country, it is often the richest, not the ethnically or religiously repressed, that first seek autonomy and eventually dissolution. In this context it is worth recalling that New England, not the South, has been the most secession prone region. As the country expanded, New Englanders attempted to include the right to untie into the constitution; the argument was that as this great country expanded South and West they would lose control over their political and economic destiny. Perhaps this is what led to four separate attempts to untie the Union. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Technology can untie the U.S.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11535) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-049 — Minds, genes, and machines — Gary Marcus > Brains exist primarily to do two things, to communicate (transfer information) and compute. This is true in every creature with a nervous system, and no less true in the human brain. In short, the brain is a machine. And the basic structure of that brain, biological substrate of all things mental, is guided in no small part by information carried in the DNA. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Minds, genes, and machines](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11197) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/The Brain Is a Machine Built From Genetic Information by Gary Marcus|The Brain Is a Machine Built From Genetic Information by Gary Marcus]] ### EDGE2006-050 — After several generations of living in the computer culture, simulation will become fully naturalized. Authenticity in the traditional sense loses its value, a vestige of another time. — Sherry Turkle > The woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability of computational objects like Paro to convince their users that they are in a relationship. I call these creatures (some virtual, some physical robots) "relational artifacts." Their ability to inspire relationship is not based on their intelligence or consciousness, but on their ability to push certain "Darwinian" buttons in people (making eye contact, for example) that make people respond as though they were in relationship. For me, relational artifacts are the new uncanny in our computer culture — as Freud once put it, the long familiar taking a form that is strangely unfamiliar. As such, they confront us with new questions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [After several generations of living in the computer culture, simulation will become fully naturalized. Authenticity in the traditional sense loses its value, a vestige of another time.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11368) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-051 — Science as just another Religion — Jordan Pollack > Finally, the third idea is to actually embrace this dangerous idea and organize a new open-source spiritual and moral movement. I think a new, greener religion, based on faith in the Gaia Hypothesis and an 11th commandment to "Protect the Earth" could catch on, especially if welcoming to existing communities of faith. Such a movement could be a new pulpit from which the evidence-based silent majority can speak with both moral force and evangelical fervor about issues critical to the future of our planet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science as just another Religion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11549) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-052 — Choosing the sex of one's child — Diane F. Halpern > In the United States, the data that show preferences for sons are more subtle than the disparate ratios of females and males found in other parts of the world, but the preference for sons is still strong. Because of space limitations, I list only a few of the many indicators that parents in the United States prefer sons: families with 2 daughters are more likely to have a third child than families with 2 sons, unmarried pregnant women who undergo ultrasound to determine the sex of the yet unborn child are less likely to be married at the time of the child's birth when the child is a girl than when it is a boy, and divorced women with a son are more likely to remarry than divorced women with a daughter. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Claremont McKenna College; Past-president, American Psychological Association; Author, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Choosing the sex of one's child](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11212) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-053 — When will the Internet become aware of itself? — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Cortical connections are expensive because they take up volume and cost energy to send information in the form of spikes along axons. About 44% of the cortical volume in humans is taken up with long-range connections, called the white matter. Interestingly, the thickness of gray matter, just a few millimeters, is nearly constant in mammals that range in brain volume over five orders of magnitude, and the volume of the white matter scales approximately as the 4/3 power of the volume of the gray matter. The larger the brain, the larger the fraction of resources devoted to communications compared to computation. - **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:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [When will the Internet become aware of itself?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11400) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-054 — The Forbidden Fruit Intuition — Thomas Metzinger > For middle-sized objects at 37° like the human brain and the human body, determinism is obviously true. The next state of the physical universe is always determined by the previous state. And given a certain brain-state plus an environment you could never have acted otherwise — a surprisingly large majority of experts in the free-will debate today accept this obvious fact. Although your future is open, this probably also means that for every single future thought you will have and for every single decision you will make, it is true that it was determined by your previous brain state. - **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:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Forbidden Fruit Intuition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11227) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-055 — Let's all stop beating Basil's car — Richard Dawkins > Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Let's all stop beating Basil's car](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11416) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-056 — A — Denis Dutton > Of course, Theory (capitalization is an English department affectation) never operated as a proper research program in any scientific sense — with hypotheses validated (or falsified) by experiment or accrued evidence. Theory was a series of intellectual fashion statements, clever slogans and postures, imported from France in the 60s, then developed out of Yale and other Theory hot spots. The academic work Theory spawned was noted more for its chosen jargons, which functioned like secret codes, than for any concern to establish truth or advance knowledge. It was all about careers and prestige. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily; Author, The Art Instinct - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10792) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-057 — Using science to get to the next and perhaps last frontier — Mahzarin Banaji > Conscious awareness is a sliver of the machine that is human intelligence but it's the only aspect we experience and hence the only aspect we come to believe exists. Thoughts, feelings, and behavior operate largely without deliberation or conscious recognition — it's the routinized, automatic, classically conditioned, pre-compiled aspects of our thoughts and feelings that make up a large part of who we are. We don't know what motivates us even though we are certain we know just why we do the things we do. We have no idea that our perceptions and judgments are incorrect (as measured objectively) even when they are. Even more stunning, our behavior is often discrepant from our own conscious intentions and goals, not just objective standards or somebody else's standards. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Department Chair; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author (with Anthony Greenwald), Blind Spot - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Using science to get to the next and perhaps last frontier](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10951) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-058 — Can science explain itself? — Marcelo Gleiser > If we take this to the extreme, it means that we will never be able to answer the question of the origin of the Universe, since it implicitly assumes that science can explain itself. We can build any cool and creative models we want using any marriage of quantum mechanics and relativity, but we still won't understand why these laws and not others. In sense, this means that our science is our science and not something universally true as many believe it is. This is not bad at all, given what we can do with it, but it does place limits on knowledge. Which may also not be a bad thing as well. It's OK not to know everything, it doesn't make science weaker. Only more human. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Can science explain itself?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11093) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-059 — More anonymity is good — Kevin Kelly > Fancy algorithms and cool technology make true anonymity in mediated environments more possible today than ever before. At the same time this techno-combo makes true anonymity in physical life much harder. For every step that masks us, we move two steps toward totally transparent unmasking. We have caller ID, but also caller ID Block, and then caller ID-only filters. Coming up: biometric monitoring and little place to hide. A world where everything about a person can be found and archived is a world with no privacy, and therefore many technologists are eager to maintain the option of easy anonymity as a refuge for the private. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [More anonymity is good](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10805) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-060 — Being alone in the universe — Rodney A. Brooks > In my lifetime we can expect to examine the surface of Mars, and the moons of the gas giants in some detail. We can also expect to be able to image extra-solar planets within a few tens of light years to resolutions where we would be able to detect evidence of large scale biological activity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Being alone in the universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10965) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-061 — Science encourages religion in the long run (and vice versa) — Scott Atran > Ever since Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, scientists and secularly-minded scholars have been predicting the ultimate demise of religion. But, if anything, religious fervor is increasing across the world, including in the United States, the world's most economically powerful and scientifically advanced society. An underlying reason is that science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well-suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs, perhaps even more so in complex and mobile societies that are increasingly divorced from nurturing family settings and long familiar environments. - **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:** 142 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science encourages religion in the long run (and vice versa)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11108) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-062 — A cacophony of — Alison Gopnik > Good scientists, almost by definition, tend towards the contrarian and ornery, and nothing gives them more pleasure than holding to an unconventional idea in the face of opposition. Indeed, orneriness and contrarianism are something of currency for science — nobody wants to have an idea that everyone else has too. Scientists are always constructing a straw man "establishment" opponent who they can then fearlessly demolish. If you combine that with defying the conventional wisdom of non-scientists you have a recipe for a very distinctive kind of scientific smugness and self-righteousness. We scientists see this contrarian habit grinning back at us in a particularly hideous and distorted form when global warming opponents or intelligent design advocates invoke the unpopularity of their ideas as evidence that they should be accepted, or at least discussed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A cacophony of](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10819) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-063 — Nothing — Charles Seife > Humanity's always been uncomfortable with zero and the void. The ancient Greeks declared them unnatural and unreal. Theologians argued that God's first act was to banish the void by the act of creating the universe ex nihilo, and Middle-Ages thinkers tried to ban zero and the other Arabic "ciphers." But the emptiness is all around us — most of the universe is void. Even as we huddle around our hearths and invent stories to convince ourselves that the cosmos is warm and full and inviting, nothingness stares back at us with empty eye sockets. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Nothing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10979) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-064 — Science Must Destroy Religion — Sam Harris > To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience. The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science Must Destroy Religion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11122) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-065 — Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin — Lee Smolin > I don't know which model of quantum gravity is right, but all the leading candidates, string theory, loop quantum gravity and others, teach us that it is possible that all properties of elementary particles are relational and environmental. In different possible universes there may be different combinations of elementary particles and forces. Indeed, all that used to be thought of as fundamental, space and the elementary particles themselves are increasingly seen, in models of quantum gravity, as themselves emergent from a more elementary network of relations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10833) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-066 — The medicination of the ancient yearning for immortality — Gerald Holton > Since the major absorption of scientific method into the research and practice of medicine in the 1860s, the longevity curve, at least for the white population in industrial countries, took off and has continued fairly constantly. That has been on the whole a benign result, and has begun to introduce the idea of tolerably good health as one of the basic Human Rights. But one now reads of projections to 200 years, and perhaps more. The economic, social and human costs of the increasing fraction of very elderly citizens have begun to be noticed already. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The medicination of the ancient yearning for immortality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10980) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-067 — It's a matter of time — Paul J. Steinhardt > Then, using the slow relaxation mechanisms considered previously, it becomes possible that the cosmological constant decreases steadily from one cycle to the next. Since the number of cycles is likely to be enormous, there is enough time for the cosmological constant to shrink by an exponential factor, even though the decrease over the course of any one cycle is too small to be undetectable. Because the evolution slows down as the cosmological constant decreases, this is the period when most of the cycles take place. There is no multiverse and there is nothing special about our region of space — we live in a typical region at a typical time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [It's a matter of time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11136) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-068 — The human brain and its products are incapable of understanding the truths about the universe — Karl Sabbagh > Nowadays, no element of the theory of giant interlocking cogwheels at work is of any use in understanding the motions of the stars and planets (and indeed Ptolemy himself did not argue that the universe really was run by giant cogwheels). Occam's Razor is used to compare two theories and allow us to choose which is more likely to be 'true' but hasn't it become a comfort blanket whenever we are faced with aspects of the universe that seem unutterably complex — string theory for example. But is string theory just the Ptolemaic clockwork de nos jours? Can it be succeeded by some simplification or might the truth be even more complex and far beyond the neural networks of our brain to understand? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The human brain and its products are incapable of understanding the truths about the universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10848) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-069 — The — Leonard Susskind > Meanwhile string theorists, much to the regret of many of them, are discovering that the number of possible environments described by their equations is far beyond millions or billions. This enormous space of possibilities, whose multiplicity may exceed ten to the 500 power, is called the Landscape. If these things prove to be true, then some features of the laws of physics (maybe most) will be local environmental facts rather than written-in-stone laws: laws that could not be otherwise. The explanation of some numerical coincidences will necessarily be that most of the multiverse is uninhabitable, but in some very tiny fraction conditions are fine-tuned enough for intelligent life to form. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10994) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-070 — Social Relativity — Tor Nørretranders > A huge body of epidemiological evidence points to the fact that inequality is in fact the prime cause for human disease. Rich people in poor countries are more healthy than poor people in rich countries, even though the latter group has more resources in absolute terms. Societies with strong gradients of wealth show higher death rates and more disease, also amongst the people at the top. Pioneers in these studies are the British epidemiologists Michael Marmot and Richard Wilkinson. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Social Relativity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10864) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-071 — The evidence that tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war. — Jared Diamond > Why is this idea dangerous? Because too many people today believe that a reason not to mistreat tribal people is that they are too nice or wise or peaceful to do those evil things, which only we evil citizens of state governments do. The idea is dangerous because, if you believe that that's the reason not to mistreat tribal peoples, then proof of the idea's truth would suggest that it's OK to mistreat them. In fact, the evidence seems to me overwhelming that the dangerous idea is true. But we should treat other people well because of ethical reasons, not because of naïve anthropological theories that will almost surely prove false.http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The evidence that tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11008) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-072 — We Have No Souls — John Horgan > Will we be liberated or enslaved by this knowledge? Officials in the Pentagon, the major funder of neural-code research, have openly broached the prospect of cyborg warriors who can be remotely controlled via brain implants, like the assassin in the recent remake of "The Manchurian Candidate." On the other hand, a cult-like group of self-described "wireheads" looks forward to the day when implants allow us to create our own realities and achieve ecstasy on demand. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [We Have No Souls](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10879) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Solving the Neural Code Could Give Us Direct Control Over Ourselves by John Horgan|Solving the Neural Code Could Give Us Direct Control Over Ourselves by John Horgan]] ### EDGE2006-073 — What if public policy makers have an obligation to engage historians, and historians have an obligation to try to help? — Stewart Brand > All historians understand that they must never, ever talk about the future. Their discipline requires that they deal in facts, and the future doesn't have any yet. A solid theory of history might be able to embrace the future, but all such theories have been discredited. Thus historians do not offer, and are seldom invited, to take part in shaping public policy. They leave that to economists. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What if public policy makers have an obligation to engage historians, and historians have an obligation to try to help?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11022) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-074 — Free will is exercised unconsciously, without awareness — Eric R. Kandel > Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely observing the electrical activity of the brain, Libet could predict what a person would do before the person was actually aware of having decided to do it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2002; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University; Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Free will is exercised unconsciously, without awareness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10894) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-075 — Myths and fairy tales are not true — Todd E. Feinberg > Some of theses patients develop, in the course of their illness and recovery (or otherwise), disturbances of self and personal relatedness that create enduring delusions and metaphorical confabulations regarding their bodies, their relationships with loved ones, and their personal experiences. A patient I examined with a right hemisphere stroke and paralyzed left arm claimed that the arm was actually severed from his brother's body by gang members, thrown in the East river, and later attached to the patient's shoulder. Another patient with a ruptured brain aneurysm and amnesia who denied his disabilities claimed he was planning to adopt (a phantom) child who was in need of medical assistance. - **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:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Myths and fairy tales are not true](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11036) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-076 — Cyber-disinhibition — Daniel Goleman > The Internet inadvertently undermines the quality of human interaction, allowing destructive emotional impulses freer reign under specific circumstances. The reason is a neural fluke that results in cyber-disinhibition of brain systems that keep our more unruly urges in check. The tech problem: a major disconnect between the ways our brains are wired to connect, and the interface offered in online interactions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Cyber-disinhibition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10908) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-077 — Brains cannot become minds without bodies — Alun Anderson > The "brain-body" view is dangerous because it requires many scientists to change the way they think: it allows back common sense interactions between brain and body that medical science feels uncomfortable with, makes more sense of feelings like falling in love and requires a different approach for people who are trying to create machines with human-like intelligence. And if this all sounds like mere assertion, there's plenty of interesting research out there to back it up. - **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:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Brains cannot become minds without bodies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11050) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies by Alun Anderson|Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies by Alun Anderson]] ### EDGE2006-078 — Biotechnology will be thoroughly domesticated in the next fifty years — Freeman Dyson > There are two severe and obvious dangers. First, smart kids and malicious grown-ups will find ways to convert biotech tools to the manufacture of lethal microbes. Second, ambitious parents will find ways to apply biotech tools to the genetic modification of their own babies. The great unanswered question is, whether we can regulate domesticated biotechnology so that it can be applied freely to animals and vegetables but not to microbes and humans. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Biotechnology will be thoroughly domesticated in the next fifty years](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10764) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-079 — The Multiverse — Brian Greene > Theoretical studies of the multiverse (within inflationary cosmology and string theory, for example) suggest that the detailed properties of the other universes may be significantly different from our own. In some, the particles making up matter may have different masses or electric charges; in others, the fundamental forces may differ in strength and even number from those we experience; in others still, the very structure of space and time may be unlike anything we've ever seen. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder of the World Science Festival and Chairman, Science Festival Foundation; Professor of Mathematics & Physics, Columbia University; author, The Hidden Reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Elegant Universe - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Multiverse](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10923) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-080 — The idea of zero parental influence — Judith Rich Harris > Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? More to the point, is this claim false? Was I wrong when I proposed that parents' power to do these things by environmental means is zero, nada, zilch? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The idea of zero parental influence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11064) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-081 — A political system based on empathy — Simon Baron-Cohen > Gone would be politicians who are skilled orators but who simply deliver monologues, standing on a platform, pointing forcefully into the air to underline their insistence — even the body language containing an implied threat of poking their listener in the chest or the face - to win over an audience. Gone too would be politicians who are so principled that they are rigid and uncompromising. - **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:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [A political system based on empathy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10778) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-082 — What are people well-informed about in the Information Age? — David Gelernter > In the 1960s, for example, all sorts of people were interested in the space program and rocket technology. Lots of people learned a little about the basics — what a "service module" or "trans-lunar injection" was, why a Redstone-Mercury vehicle was different from an Atlas-Mercury — all sorts of grade-school students, lawyers, housewives, English profs were up on these topics. Today there is no comparable interest in computers & the internet, and no comparable knowledge. "TCP/IP," "Routers," "Ethernet protocol," "cache hits" — these are topics of no interest whatsoever outside the technical community. The contrast is striking. - **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:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What are people well-informed about in the Information Age?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10937) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-083 — Open Source Currency — Douglas Rushkoff > Throughout most of history, complementary currencies existed alongside centralized currency. While local currency was used for labor and local transactions, centralized currencies were used for long distance and foreign trade. Local currencies were based on a model of abundance — there was so much of it that people constantly invested it. That's why we saw so many cathedrals being built in the late middle ages, and unparalleled levels of investment in infrastructure and maintenance. Centralized currency, on the other hand, needed to retain value over long distances and periods of time, so it was based on precious and scarce resources, such as gold. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Open Source Currency](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11079) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-084 — Radicalized relativity — Richard Foreman > I realize that my own artistic efforts have, in a small way, contributed to the current aesthetic/emotional environment in which the potential spiritual depth and complexity of evolved human consciousness is trumped by the bedazzling shuffle of the shards of inherited elements — never before as available to the collective consciousness. The resultant orientation towards "cultural relativity" in the arts certainly comes in part from the psychic re-orientation resulting from Einstein's bombshell dropped at the beginning of the last century. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Playwright & Director; Founder, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Radicalized relativity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10412) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-085 — A marriage option for all — David G. Myers > I foresee a bridge across this divide as folks on both the left and the right engage the growing evidence of our panhuman longing for belonging, of the benefits of marriage, and of the biology and persistence of sexual orientation. We now have lots of data showing that marriage is conducive to healthy adults, thriving children, and flourishing communities. We also have a dozen discoveries of gay-straight differences in everything from brain physiology to skill at mentally rotating geometric figures. And we have an emerging professional consensus that sexual reorientation therapies seldom work. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A marriage option for all](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10525) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-086 — The free market — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > My dangerous idea is dangerous only to those who support the hegemony of the market. It consists in pointing out that the imperial free market wears no clothes — it does not exist in the first place, and what passes for it is dangerous to the future well being of our species. Scientist need to turn their attention to what the complex system that is human life, will require in the future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The free market](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10647) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-087 — The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism — Philip Zimbardo > There is a decisive decisional moment when the individual is caught up in a vector of forces emanating from the behavioral context. Those forces combine to increase the probability of acting to harm others or acting to help others. That decision may not be consciously planned or taken mindfully, but impulsively driven by strong situational forces external to the person. Among those action vectors are group pressures and group identity, diffusion of responsibility, temporal focus on the immediate moment without entertaining costs and benefits in the future, among others. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University; Author, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10421) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-088 — Democracy may be on its way out — Haim Harari > Can we invent a better new system? Perhaps. But this cannot happen if we are not allowed to utter the sentence: "There may be a political system which is better than Democracy". Today's political correctness does not allow one to say such things. The result of this prohibition will be an inevitable return to some kind of totalitarian rule, different from that of the emperors, the colonialists or the landlords of the past, but not more just. On the other hand, open and honest thinking about this issue may lead either to a gigantic worldwide revolution in educating the poor masses, thus saving democracy, or to a careful search for a just (repeat, just) and better system. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Democracy may be on its way out](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10536) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-089 — The idea that we understand plutonium — Jeremy Bernstein > The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is. These pits, in the thousands, are now decades old. What is dangerous is the idea that they have retained their integrity and can be safely stored into the indefinite future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Stevens Institute of Technology; Former Staff Writer, The New Yorker - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The idea that we understand plutonium](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10660) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-090 — Marx was right: the — James J. O'Donnell > From the earliest Babylonian and Chinese moments of "civilization", we have agreed that human affairs depend on an organizing power in the hands of a few people (usually with religious charisma to undergird their authority) who reside in a functionally central location. "Political science" assumes in its etymology the "polis" or city-state of Greece as the model for community and government. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Marx was right: the](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10430) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-091 — The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion — Ray Kurzweil > First the inevitability: the power of information technologies is doubling each year, and moreover comprises areas beyond computation, most notably our knowledge of biology and of our own intelligence. It took 15 years to sequence HIV and from that perspective the genome project seemed impossible in 1990. But the amount of genetic data we were able to sequence doubled every year while the cost came down by half each year. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal Developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10547) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/Information Technology Can Compress Billions of Years Into Decades by Ray Kurzweil|Information Technology Can Compress Billions of Years Into Decades by Ray Kurzweil]] ### EDGE2006-092 — The purpose of life is to disperse energy — Scott Sampson > The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The purpose of life is to disperse energy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-093 — The self is a conceptual chimera — John Allen Paulos > Doubt that a supernatural being exists is banal, but the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar," is my candidate for Dangerous Idea. This is, of course, Hume's idea — and Buddha's as well — that the self is an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, that it is not an essential and persistent entity, but rather a conceptual chimera. If this belief ever became widely and viscerally felt throughout a society — whether because of advances in neurobiology, cognitive science, philosophical insights, or whatever — its effects on that society would be incalculable. (Or so this assemblage of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes sometimes thinks.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The self is a conceptual chimera](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10439) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-094 — A universal grammar of [mental] life — Unattributed Edge contributor > Unfortunately, what appears to be a rather modest proposal on some counts, is dangerous on another. It is dangerous to those who abhor biologically grounded theories on the often misinterpreted perspective that biology determines our fate, derails free will, and erases the soul. But a look at systems other than the human mind makes it transparently clear that the argument from biological endowment does not entail any of these false inferences. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [A universal grammar of [mental] life](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10558) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-095 — Why I Hope the Standard Model is Wrong about Why There is More Matter Than Antimatter — Frank Tipler > I am very much afraid that the particle physicists are wrong about this Standard Model pure energy conversion process being forever irrelevant to human affairs. I have recently come to believe that the consistency of quantum field theory requires that it should be possible to convert up to 100 kilograms of ordinary matter into pure energy via this process using a device that could fit inside the trunk of a car, a device that could be manufactured in a small factory. Such a device would solve all our energy problems — we would not need fossil fuels — but 100 kilograms of energy is the energy released by a 1,000-megaton nuclear bomb. If such a bomb can be manufactured in a small factory, then terrorists everywhere will eventually have such weapons. I fear for the human race if this comes to pass. I very hope I am wrong about the technological feasibility of such a bomb. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 156 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Why I Hope the Standard Model is Wrong about Why There is More Matter Than Antimatter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10689) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-096 — We are all virtual — Clifford Pickover > Our desire for entertaining virtual realities is increasing. As our understanding of the human brain also accelerates, we will create both imagined realities and a set of memories to support these simulacrums. For example, someday it will be possible to simulate your visit to the Middle Ages and, to make the experience realistic, we may wish to ensure that you believe yourself to actually be in the Middle Ages. False memories may be implanted, temporarily overriding your real memories. This should be easy to do in the future — given that we can already coax the mind to create richly detailed virtual worlds filled with ornate palaces and strange beings through the use of the drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine). In other words, the brains of people who take DMT appear to access a treasure chest of images and experience that typically include jeweled cities and temples, angelic beings, feline shapes, serpents, and shiny metals. When we understand the brain better, we will be able to safely generate more controlled visions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 169 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [We are all virtual](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10448) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-097 — A spoon is like a headache — Donald D. Hoffman > Once one abandons public physical objects, one must reformulate many current open problems in science. One example is the mind-brain relation. There are no public brains, only my brain experiences and your brain experiences. These brain experiences are just the simplified visual experiences of homo sapiens, shaped for survival in certain niches. The chances that our brain experiences resemble some mind-independent truth are remote at best, and those who would claim otherwise must surely explain the miracle. Failing a clever explanation of this miracle, there is no reason to believe brains cause anything, including minds. And here the wolf unzips the sheep skin, and darts out into the open. The danger becomes apparent the moment we switch from boons to sprains. Oh, pardon the spoonerism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [A spoon is like a headache](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10569) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-098 — We are entirely alone — Keith Devlin > I think that many people find the suggestion dangerous because they see it as leading to a life devoid of meaning or moral values. They see it as a suggestion full of despair, an idea that makes our lives seem pointless. I believe that the opposite is the case. As the product of that unique, freak accident, finding ourselves able to reflect on and enjoy our conscious existence, the very unlikeliness and uniqueness of our situation surely makes us highly appreciative of what we have. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [We are entirely alone](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10703) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-099 — Laws requiring parental licensure — David Lykken > About 70% of incarcerated delinquents, of teen-age pregnancies, of adolescent runaways, involve (I think result from) fatherless rearing. Because these frightening curves continue to accelerate, I believe we must eventually confront the need for parental licensure — you can't keep that newborn unless you are 21, married and self-supporting — not just for society's safety but so those babies will have a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Behavioral Geneticist and Emeritus Professor, University of Minnesota - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Laws requiring parental licensure](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10458) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-100 — This is all there is — Robert Provine > Resolution of religious conflict is impossible because there is no empirical test of the ghostly, and many theologians prey, intentionally or not, upon the fears, superstitions, irrationality, and herd tendencies that are our species' neurobehavioral endowment. Religious fundamentalism inflames conflict and prevents solution—the more extreme and irrational one's position, the stronger one's faith, and, when possessing absolute truth, compromise is not an option. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [This is all there is](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10570) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-101 — Understanding molecular biology without discovering the origins of life — George Dyson > "The only thing of which I am sure," argued Samuel Butler in 1880, "is that the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them. " - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Understanding molecular biology without discovering the origins of life](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10716) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-102 — Following Sisyphus, not Pandora — Howard Gardner > Yet I lay awake at night with the dangerous thought that pessimists may be right. For the first time in history — as far as we know! — we humans live in a world that we could completely destroy. The human destructive tendencies described in the past by Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud, the "realist" picture of human beings embraced more recently by many sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and game theorists might be correct; these tendencies could overwhelm any proclivities toward altruism, protection of the environment, control of weapons of destruction, progress in human relations, or seeking to become good ancestors. As one vivid data point: there are few signs that the unprecedented power possessed by the United States is being harnessed to positive ends. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Following Sisyphus, not Pandora](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10366) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-103 — Everything is pointless — Susan Blackmore > We humans can, and do, make up our own purposes, but ultimately the universe has none. All the wonderfully complex, and beautifully designed things we see around us were built by the same purposeless process — evolution by natural selection. This includes everything from microbes and elephants to skyscrapers and computers, and even our own inner selves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Everything is pointless](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10470) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-104 — Telling More Than We Can Know — Richard Nisbett > The first inkling that social psychologists had about just how ignorant we are about our thinking processes came from the study of cognitive dissonance beginning in the late 1950s. When our behavior is insufficiently justified, we move our beliefs into line with the behavior so as to avoid the cognitive dissonance we would otherwise experience. But we are usually quite unaware that we have done that, and when it is pointed out to us we recruit phantom reasons for the change in attitude. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Telling More Than We Can Know](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10581) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-105 — There is something new under the sun — us — Gregory Paul > There is evidence that such change has occurred. Henry Harpending and I have, we think, made a strong case that natural selection changed the Ashkenazi Jews over a thousand years or so, favoring certain kinds of cognitive abilities and generating genetic diseases as a side effect. Bruce Lahn's team has found new variants of brain-development genes: one, ASPM, appears to have risen to high frequency in Europe and the Middle East in about six thousand years. We don't yet know what this new variant does, but it certainly could affect the human psyche — and if it does, Thucydides was wrong. We may not be doomed to repeat the Sicilian expedition: on the other hand, since we don't understand much yet about the changes that have occurred, we might be even more doomed. But at any rate, we have almost certainly changed. There is something new under the sun — us. This concept opens strange doors. If true, it means that the people of Sumeria and Egypt's Old Kingdom were probably fundamentally different from us: human nature has changed — some, anyhow — over recorded history. Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued that there was something qualitatively different about the human mind in ancient civilization. On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have been on to something. If people a few thousand years ago thought and acted differently because of biological differences, history is never going to be the same. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Researcher; Author, The Princeton Field Guide of Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 257 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [There is something new under the sun — us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10735) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-106 — Relativism — Martin Seligman > The most visible person to say this is none other than Pope Benedict XVI in his denunciations of the "dictatorship of the relative." But worries about relativism are not only a matter of dispute in theology; there are parallel dissenters from the relative in science, in philosophy, in ethics, in mathematics, in anthropology, in sociology, in the humanities, in childrearing, and in evolutionary biology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Director, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; Author, Flourish - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Relativism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10375) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-107 — Modern science is a product of biology — Arnold Trehub > The entire conceptual edifice of modern science is a product of biology. Even the most basic and profound ideas of science — think relativity, quantum theory, the theory of evolution — are generated and necessarily limited by the particular capacities of our human biology. This implies that the content and scope of scientific knowledge is not open-ended. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Modern science is a product of biology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10481) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-108 — Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments — Unattributed Edge contributor > Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be dangerous. Summers was subjected to months of vilification, and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate inscribed by parents). The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10593) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-109 — There is something new under the sun — us — Gregory Cochran > There is evidence that such change has occurred. Henry Harpending and I have, we think, made a strong case that natural selection changed the Ashkenazi Jews over a thousand years or so, favoring certain kinds of cognitive abilities and generating genetic diseases as a side effect. Bruce Lahn's team has found new variants of brain-development genes: one, ASPM, appears to have risen to high frequency in Europe and the Middle East in about six thousand years. We don't yet know what this new variant does, but it certainly could affect the human psyche — and if it does, Thucydides was wrong. We may not be doomed to repeat the Sicilian expedition: on the other hand, since we don't understand much yet about the changes that have occurred, we might be even more doomed. But at any rate, we have almost certainly changed. There is something new under the sun — us. This concept opens strange doors. If true, it means that the people of Sumeria and Egypt's Old Kingdom were probably fundamentally different from us: human nature has changed — some, anyhow — over recorded history. Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued that there was something qualitatively different about the human mind in ancient civilization. On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have been on to something. If people a few thousand years ago thought and acted differently because of biological differences, history is never going to be the same. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Consultant; Adaptive Optics and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah; Coauthor (with Henry Harpending), The 10,000 Year Explosion - **Extract length:** 257 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [There is something new under the sun — us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10750) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-110 — Culture is natural — Dan Sperber > Species evolve because of genetic differences among their members; therefore you cannot leave biological difference out of a biological approach. Luckily, it so happens that biological differences among humans are minor and don't produce sub-species or "races," and that human sexual dimorphism is relatively limited. In particular, all humans have mind/brains made up of the same mechanisms, with just fine-tuning differences. (Think how very different all this would be if — however improbably — Neanderthals had survived and developed culturally like we did so that there really were different human "races"). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Culture is natural](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10384) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-111 — No More Teacher's Dirty Looks — Roger Schank > If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. — JS Mill - **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` - **Source:** [No More Teacher's Dirty Looks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10492) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-112 — Mind is a universally distributed quality — Rudy Rucker > Yes, the workings of a human brain are a deterministic computation that could be emulated by any universal computer. And, yes, I sense more to my mental phenomena than the rule-bound exfoliation of reactions to inputs: this residue is the inner light, the raw sensation of existence. But, no, that inner glow is not the exclusive birthright of humans, nor is it solely limited to biological organisms. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Mind is a universally distributed quality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10606) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Every Object May Have a Mind by Rudy Rucker|Every Object May Have a Mind by Rudy Rucker]] ### EDGE2006-113 — A radical reevaluation of the character of time — Piet Hut > For this to be shocking, it has to come in a scientifically respectable way, as a very precise and inescapable conclusion — it should have the technical strength of a body of knowledge like quantum mechanics, as opposed to collections of opinions on the level of cultural relativism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 48 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A radical reevaluation of the character of time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10394) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-114 — Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't — Michael Shermer > People have a hard time accepting free market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer — a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer — a Government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10503) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-115 — Fields of Danger — Brian Goodwin > Could it be that biology and culture are not so different after all; that both are based on historical traditions and languages that are used to construct patterns of relationship embodied in communities, either of cells or of individuals? These self-organising activities are certainly mysterious, but not unintelligible. My own work, with many colleagues, cast morphogenetic fields in mathematical form that revealed how space (morphology) and time (behaviour) get organised in subtle but robust ways in developing organisms and communities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Fields of Danger](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10617) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-116 — Emotional intelligence — John Gottman > The most dangerous idea I know of is emotional intelligence. Within the context of the cognitive neuroscience revolution in psychology, the focus on emotions is extraordinary. The over-arching idea that there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, that it has a neuroscience, that it is inter-personal, i.e., between two brains, rather than within one brain, are all quite revolutionary concepts about human psychology. I could go on. It is also a revolution in thinking about infancy, couples, family, adult development, aging, etc. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Co-founder, The Gottman Relationship Institute; Author, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Emotional intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10403) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-117 — Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account. — Clay Shirky > Conscious self-modulation of behavior is a spectrum. We have treated it as a single property — you are either capable of free will, or you fall into an exceptional category — because we could not identify, measure, or manipulate the various components that go into such self-modulation. Those days are now ending, and everyone from advertisers to political consultants increasingly understands, in voluminous biological detail, how to manipulate consciousness in ways that weaken our notion of free will. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social & Technology Network Topology Researcher; Adjunct Professor, NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); Author, Cognitive Surplus - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10514) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2006-118 — The differences between humans and nonhumans are quantitative, not qualitative — Irene Pepperberg > And, in case anyone wonders at my own personal view: I believe that humans are the ultimate generalists, creatures that may lack specific talents or physical adaptations that have been finely honed in other species, but whose additional brain power enables them — in an exquisite manner — to, for example, integrate information, improvise with what is present, and alter or adapt to a wide range of environments…but that this additional brain power is (and provides) a quantitative, not qualitative difference. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The differences between humans and nonhumans are quantitative, not qualitative](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10632) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted