# Edge 2008 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-have-you-changed-your-mind-about-why) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-have-you-changed-your-mind-about-why) - **Archive year:** 2008 - **Response rows represented:** 166 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 166 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 166 ## 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 ### EDGE2008-001 — Wrestling with Jean Piaget, my Paragon — Howard Gardner > Why I changed my mind is an issue principally of biography: some of the change has to do with my own choices (I worked for 20 years with brain damaged patients); and some with the Zeitgeist (I was strongly influenced by the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, on the one hand, and by empirical discoveries in psychology and biology on the other). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Wrestling with Jean Piaget, my Paragon](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11927) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-002 — Veridical Perception — Donald D. Hoffman > Although the image at the eye, for instance, contains insufficient information by itself to recover the true state of the world, natural selection has built into the visual system the correct prior assumptions about the world, and about how it projects onto our retinas, so that our visual estimates are, in general, veridical. And we can verify that this is the case, by deducing those prior assumptions from psychological experiments, and comparing them with the world. Vision scientists are now succeeding in this enterprise. But we need not wait for their final report to conclude with confidence that perception is veridical. All we need is the obvious rhetorical question: Of what possible use is non-veridical perception? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Veridical Perception](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11942) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-003 — The Nature of Human Nature — Michael Shermer > The data from evolutionary psychology has now convinced me that we evolved a dual set of moral sentiments: within groups we tend to be pro-social and cooperative, but between groups we are tribal and xenophobic. Archaeological evidence indicates that Paleolithic humans were anything but noble savages, and that civilization has gradually but ineluctably reduced the amount of within-group aggression and between group violence. And behavior genetics has erased the tabula rasa and replaced it with a highly constrained biological template upon which the environment can act. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Nature of Human Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11943) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-004 — I stopped cheering for the Romans — James J. O'Donnell > Sometimes the later Roman empire seems very long ago and far away, but at other times, when we explore Edward Gibbon's famous claim to have described the triumph of "barbarism and religion", it can seem as fresh as next week. And we always know that we're supposed root for the Romans. When I began my career as historian thirty years ago, I was all in favor of those who were fighting to preserve the old order. "I'd rather be Belisarius than Stilicho," I said to my classes often enough that they heard it as a mantra of my attitude — preferring the empire-restoring Roman general of the sixth-century to the barbarian general who served Rome and sought compromise and adjustment with neighbors in the fourth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [I stopped cheering for the Romans](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11959) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-005 — The Omniscience and Omnipotence of Science — Colin Tudge > Fair enough. The approach is obviously powerful, and it is hard to see how solid progress of a factual kind could be made in any other way. It produces answers of the kind known as "robust". "Robust" does not of course mean "unequivocally true" and still less does it meet the lawyers' criteria — "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". But robustness is pretty good; certainly good enough to be going on with. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Author, Six Steps Back to the Land - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Omniscience and Omnipotence of Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11974) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-006 — Relativism — Timothy Taylor > Where once I would have striven to see Incan child sacrifice 'in their terms', I am increasingly committed to seeing it in ours. Where once I would have directed attention to understanding a past cosmology of equal validity to my own, I now feel the urgency to go beyond a culturally-attuned explanation and reveal cold sadism, deployed as a means of social control by a burgeoning imperial power. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Relativism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11597) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-007 — Physicist; Technical Consultant; Science Fiction Writer; Author, The Transparent Society — David Brin > Alvin Toffler appears to have sussed it. Back in 1999, while we were fretting over a silly "Y2K Bug" in ancient COBOL code, something else happened, at a deeper level. Our weird governance issues are only surface symptoms of what may have been a culture-wide crisis of confidence, upon the arrival of that "2" in the millennium column. Yes, people seemed to take the shift complacently, going about their business, But, underneath all the blithe shrugs, millions have turned their backs upon the future, even as a topic of discussion or interest. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Speaker; Technical Consultant; Author, Existence - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Physicist; Technical Consultant; Science Fiction Writer; Author, The Transparent Society](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11762) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-008 — The Obligations and Responsibilities of The Scientist — Leon M. Lederman > Taking even a cursory stock of current events, I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, urged his students to run for public office and get elected. He insisted that to be an advisor (he was an advisor to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, later to Eisenhower and to the AEC) was ultimately an exercise in futility and that the power belonged to those who are elected. Then, we thought the old man was bonkers. But today...... - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Obligations and Responsibilities of The Scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11612) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-009 — Can Robots See God? — Rudy Rucker > My belief in this will-o-the-wisp was motivated by a gut feeling that people have numinous inner qualities that will not be found in machines. For one thing, our self-awareness lets us reflect on ourselves and get into endless mental regresses: "I know that I know that I know..." For another, we have moments of mystical illumination when we seem to be in contact, if not with God, then with some higher cosmic mind. I felt that surely no machine could be self-aware or experience the divine light. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Can Robots See God?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11777) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-010 — How I Became An Evolutionary Psychologist — Dan Sperber > As a student, I was influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and even more by Noam Chomsky. Both of them dared talk about "human nature" when the received view was that there was no such thing. In my own work, I argued for a naturalistic approach in the social sciences. I took for granted that human cognitive dispositions were shaped by biological evolution and more specifically by Darwinian selection. While I did occasionally toy with evolutionary speculations, I failed to see at the time how they could play more than a quite marginal role in the study of human psychology and culture. - **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:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How I Became An Evolutionary Psychologist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11627) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-011 — Everything — Nick Bostrom > Typically, my beliefs about big issues change in small steps. Ideally, these steps should approximate a random walk, like the stock market. It should be impossible for me to predict how my beliefs on some topic will change in the future. If I believed that a year hence I will assign a higher probability to some hypothesis than I do today — why, in that case I could raise the probability right away. Given knowledge of what I will believe in the future, I would defer to the beliefs of my future self, provided that I think my future self will be better informed than I am now and at least as rational. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Oxford University; Director, Future of Humanity Institute; Author, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Everything](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11791) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-012 — There are No Moral Facts — Thomas Metzinger > Here is where I have changed my mind. There are no moral facts. Moral sentences have no truth-values. The world itself is silent, it just doesn’t speak to us in normative affairs — nothing in the physical universe tells us what makes an action a good action or a specific brain-state a desirable one. Sure, we all would like to know what a good neurophenomenological configuration really is, and how we should optimize our conscious minds in the future. But it looks like, in a more rigorous and serious sense, there is just no ethical knowledge to be had. We are alone. And if that is true, all we have to go by are the contingent moral intuitions evolution has hard-wired into our emotional self-model. If we choose to simply go by what feels good, then our future is easy to predict: It will be primitive hedonism and organized religion. - **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:** 150 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [There are No Moral Facts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11642) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-013 — The Universe's Expansion — Gino Segre > The situation with the explosion we call the Big Bang is obviously more complicated, but really not that different, or so I thought. The standard picture said that there was an initial explosion, space began to expand and galaxies moved away from one another. The density of matter in the Universe determined whether the Big Bang would eventually be followed by a Big Crunch or whether the celestial objects would continue to move away from one another with decreasing acceleration. In other words one could calculate the Universe's escape velocity. Admittedly the discovery of Dark Matter, an unknown quantity seemingly five times as abundant as known matter, seriously altered the framework but not in a fundamental way since Dark Matter was after all still matter, even if its identity is unknown. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Universe's Expansion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11807) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-014 — The Limits Of Darwinian Reasoning — Unattributed Edge contributor > Let me be clear about the claim here. I am not rejecting Darwin’s emphasis on comparative approaches, that is, the use of phylogenetic or historical data. I still practice this approach, contrasting the abilities of humans and animals in the service of understanding what is uniquely human and what is shared. And I still think our cognitive prowess evolved, and that the human brain and mind can be studied in some of the same ways that we study other bits of anatomy and behavior. But where I have lost the faith, so to speak, is in the power of the adaptive program to explain or predict particular design features of human thought. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Limits Of Darwinian Reasoning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11657) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-015 — Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author: The Cognitive Brain — Arnold Trehub > Now I am convinced that the future understanding of our most important physical principles will be profoundly shaped by what we learn in the living realm of biology. What have changed my mind are the relatively recent developments in the theoretical constructs and empirical findings in the sciences of the brain — the biological foundation of all thought. Progress here can cast new light on the fundamental subjective factors that constrain our scientific formulations in what we take to be an objective enterprise. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author: The Cognitive Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11822) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-016 — In Praise of Fishing Expeditions — Robert Provine > Ultimately, this atheoretical and largely descriptive work provided many surprises and counterintuitive findings. For example, laughter, like crying, is not consciously controlled, contrary to literature suggesting that we speak ha-ha as we would choose a word in speech. Most laughter is not a response to humor. Laughter and speech are controlled by different brain mechanisms, with speech dominating laughter. Contagious laughter is the product of neurologically programmed social behavior. Contrasts between chimpanzee and human laughter reveal why chimpanzees can't talk (inadequate breath control), and the evolutionary event necessary for the selection for human speech (bipedality). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [In Praise of Fishing Expeditions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11672) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-017 — We Differ More Than We Thought — Mark Pagel > The new figure for us, then, is significant. It derives from among other things, many small genetic differences that have emerged from studies that compare human populations. Some confer the ability among adults to digest milk, others to withstand equatorial sun, others yet confer differences in body shape or size, resistance to particular diseases, tolerance to hot or cold, how many offspring a female might eventually produce, and even the production of endorphins — those internal opiate-like compounds. We also differ by surprising amounts in the numbers of copies of some genes we have. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, UK; Fellow, Royal Society; Author, Wired for Culture - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [We Differ More Than We Thought](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11837) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-018 — Soul Searching — Todd E. Feinberg > I am not suggesting that anything like a soul survives the death of the brain. Indeed, the link between the life of the brain and the life of the mind is irreducible, the one completely dependant upon the other. Indeed the danger of capturing the beauty and mystery of a personal consciousness and identity with the somewhat metaphorical designation "soul" is the tendency for the grandiose metaphor to obscure the actual accomplishments of the brain. The soul is not a "thing" independent of the living brain; it is part and parcel of it, its most remarkable feature, but nonetheless inextricably bound to its life and death. - **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:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Soul Searching](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11687) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-019 — We Are Alone — Martin Seligman > If my math had been better, I would have become an astronomer rather than a psychologist. I was after the very greatest questions and finding life elsewhere in the universe seemed the greatest of them all. Understanding thinking, emotion, and mental health was second best — science for weaker minds like mine.Carl Sagan and I were close colleagues in the late 1960's when we both taught at Cornell. I devoured his thrilling book with I.I. Shklovskii (Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1966) in one twenty-four hour sitting, and I came away convinced that intelligent life was commonplace across our galaxy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Director, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; Author, Flourish - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [We Are Alone](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11852) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-020 — The Fallacy of Hypothesis Testing — Irene Pepperberg > First, and probably most importantly, I've learned that one often needs simply to sit and observe and learn about one's subject before even attempting to devise a testable hypothesis. What are the physical capacities of the subject? What is the social and ecological structure in which it lives? Does some anecdotal evidence suggest the form that the hypothesis should take? Few granting agencies are willing to provide support for this step, but it is critical to the scientific process, particularly for truly innovative research. Often, a proposal to gain observational experience is dismissed as being a "fishing expedition"…but how can one devise a workable hypothesis to test without first acquiring basic knowledge of the system, and how better to obtain such basic knowledge than to observe the system without any preconceived notions? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Fallacy of Hypothesis Testing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11702) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-021 — Neuroscientist, New York University; Author, The Synaptic Self — Joseph LeDoux > Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious - **Extract length:** 157 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Neuroscientist, New York University; Author, The Synaptic Self](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11867) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-022 — To Unify or Not: That is the Question — Marcelo Gleiser > All of my recent anti-unification convictions can crumble during the next few years, after our big new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, is turned on. Many colleagues hope that supersymmetry will finally show its face. Others even bet on possible signs of extra dimensions revealed. However, I have a feeling things won't turn out so nicely. The model of unification, which is so aesthetically appealing, may be simply this, an aesthetically appealing description of Nature, which, unfortunately, doesn't correspond to physical reality. Nature doesn't share our myths. The stakes are high indeed. But being a mild agnostic, I don't believe until there is evidence. And then, there is no need to believe any longer, which is precisely the beauty of science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [To Unify or Not: That is the Question](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11717) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-023 — Writer and Television Producer; Author, The Riemann Hypothesis — Karl Sabbagh > I used to believe that there were experts and non-experts and that, on the whole, the judgment of experts is more accurate, more valid, and more correct than my own judgment. But over the years, thinking — and I should add, experience — has changed my mind. What experts have that I don't are knowledge and experience in some specialized area. What, as a class, they don't have any more than I do is the skills of judgment, rational thinking and wisdom. And I've come to believe that some highly ‘qualified' people have less of that than I do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Writer and Television Producer; Author, The Riemann Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11882) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-024 — The Bible Is Inane — David Bodanis > Mathematics was especially important here, and I remember how entranced I was when I first saw the power of axiomatic systems. Those were logical structures that were as beautiful as complex crystals — but far, far clearer. If there was one inaccuracy at any point in the system, you could trace it, like a scarcely visible stretching crack through the whole crystal; you could see exactly how it had to undermine the validity of far distant parts as well. Since there are obvious factual inaccuracies in the Bible, as well as repugnant moral commands, then — just as with any tight axiomatic system — huge other parts of it had to be wrong, as well. In my mind that discredited it all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Futurist; Author, Einstein's Greatest Mistake - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Bible Is Inane](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11566) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-025 — Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, A Many Colored Glass — Freeman Dyson > When facts change your mind, that's not always science. It may be history. I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. This question is important, because the myth of the nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end is widely believed. To demolish this myth may be a useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, A Many Colored Glass](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11732) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-026 — The Internet — Douglas Rushkoff > I thought that it would change people. I thought it would allow us to build a new world through which we could model new behaviors, values, and relationships. In the 90's, I thought the experience of going online for the first time would change a person's consciousness as much as if they had dropped acid in the 60's. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Internet](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11897) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-027 — Clear and simple is not the same as provable and well defined — Haim Harari > The reliability of forecasts regarding weather, stock markets and astrology is descending in that order. All of them are based on guesses, with or without historical data. Most of them are rarely revisited by the media, after the fact, thus avoiding being exposed as unreliable. In most cases, predicting that the immediate future will be the same as the immediate past, has a higher probability of being correct, than the predictions of the gurus. Yet, we, as scientists, have considerable faith in weather predictions; much less faith in predicting peaks and dips of the stock market and no faith at all is astrology. We can explain why, and we are certainly right, but we cannot prove why. Proving it by historical success data, is as convincing (for the future) as the predictions themselves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Clear and simple is not the same as provable and well defined](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11582) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-028 — Predicting the Future — Ed Regis > I used to think you could predict the future. In "Profiles of the Future," Arthur C. Clarke made it seem so easy. And so did all those other experts who confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who for decades predicted "human equivalence in ten years," the nanotechnology prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing within fifteen years, and so on. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Predicting the Future](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11747) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-029 — Explanations — Piet Hut > I used to pride myself on the fact that I could explain almost anything to anyone, on a simple enough level, using analogies. No matter how abstract an idea in physics may be, there always seems to be some way in which we can get at least some part of the idea across. If colleagues shrugged and said, oh, well, that idea is too complicated or too abstract to be explained in simple terms, I thought they were either lazy or not very skilled in thinking creatively around a problem. I could not imagine a form of knowledge that could not be communicated in some limited but valid approximation or other. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Explanations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11912) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-030 — Rapid climate change — Laurence C. Smith > Let's put the 2007 sea-ice year into context. In the 1970's, when NASA first began mapping sea ice from microwave satellites, its annual minimum extent (in September, at summer's end) hovered close to 8 million square kilometers, about the area of the conterminous United States minus Ohio. In September 2007 it dropped abruptly to 4.3 million square kilometers, the area of the conterminous United State minus Ohio and all the other twenty-four states east of the Mississippi, as well as North Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Iowa. Canada's Northwest Passage was freed of ice for the first time in human memory. From Bering Strait where the U.S. and Russia brush lips, open blue water stretched almost to the North Pole. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Rapid climate change](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11279) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-031 — Maybe MBAs Should Design Computers After All — David Dalrymple > Imagine if your company or organization had one fellow [the CPU] who sat in an isolated office, and refused to talk with anyone except his two most trusted deputies [the Northbridge and Southbridge], through which all the actual work the company does must be funneled. Because this one man — let's call him Bob — is so overloaded doing all the work of the entire company, he has several assistants [memory controllers] who remember everything for him. They do this through a complex system [virtual memory] of file cabinets of various sizes [physical memories], the organization over which they have strictly limited autonomy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Maybe MBAs Should Design Computers After All](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11447) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-032 — If we could just get people to understand the science, they'd agree with us.Not — Lee M. Silver > Since this experience, I have purposely engaged other well-educated defenders of the irrational, as well as numerous students at my university, in spontaneous one-on-one debates about a host of contentious biological subjects including evolution, organic farming, homeopathy, cloned animals, "chemicals" in our food, and genetic engineering. Much to my chagrin, even after politics, ideology, economics, and other cultural issues have been put aside, there is often a refusal to accept scientific implications of rational argumentation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor at Princeton University in the Department of Molecular Biology - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [If we could just get people to understand the science, they'd agree with us.Not](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11294) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-033 — Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology — Max Tegmark > This reconstructed consensus view of the world that humans, cats, aliens and future robots would all agree on is not free from some of the above-mentioned shared illusions. However, it is by definition free from illusions that are unique to biological minds, and therefore decouples from the issue of how our human consciousness works. This is why I've changed my mind: although understanding the detailed nature of human consciousness is a fascinating challenge in its own right, it is notnecessary for a fundamental theory of physics, which need "only" derive the consensus view from its equations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; President, Future of Life Institute; Author, Life 3.0 - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11462) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-034 — Whats Special About Human Language — Gary Marcus > The idea that most impressed me — and did the most to shake me of the belief that language was separate from the rest of the mind — goes back to Darwin. Not "survival of the fittest" (a phrase actually coined by Herbert Spencer) but his notion, now amply confirmed at the molecular level, that all biology is the product of what he called "descent with modification". Every species, and every biological system evolves through a combination of inheritance (descent) and change (modification). Nothing, no matter how original it may appear, emerges from scratch. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Whats Special About Human Language](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11309) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-035 — Neuroscientist, Stanford University, Author, A Primate's Memoir — Robert Sapolsky > The first was realizing, from my own data and that of others, that being dominant has far less to do with winning fights than with social intelligence and impulse control. The other was realizing that while health has something to do with social rank, it has far more to do with personality and social affiliation — if you want to be a healthy baboon, don't be a socially isolated one. This particular shift has something to do with the accretion of new facts, new statistical techniques for analyzing data, blah blah. Probably most importantly, it has to do with the fact that I was once a hermetic 22-year old studying baboons and now, 30 years later, I've changed my mind about a lot of things in my own life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Neuroscientist, Stanford University, Author, A Primate's Memoir](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11477) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-036 — Attitudes Trump Facts — John Mccarthy > There's some of that, but overwhelmingly the email, both pro and con, concerns my attitude, not my (alleged) facts. "How can you be so blithely cornucopian when everybody knows ..." or "I'm glad someone has the courage to take on all those doomsters." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Attitudes Trump Facts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11156) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-037 — Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, The Trouble With Physics — Lee Smolin > Although I have changed my mind about several ideas and theories, my longest struggle has been with the concept of time. The most obvious and universal aspect about reality, as we experience it, is that it is structured as a succession of moments, each of which comes into being, supplanting what was just present and is now past. But, as soon as we describe nature in terms of mathematical equations, the present moment and the flow of time seem to disappear, and time becomes just a number, a reading on an instrument, like any other. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, The Trouble With Physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11324) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-038 — Permanent Reincarnation — Tor Nørretranders > 98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every year. 98 percent! Water molecules stays in your body for two weeks (and for an even shorter time in a hot climate), the atoms in your bones stays there for a few months. Some atoms stay for years. But almost not one single atom stay with you in your body from cradle to grave. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Permanent Reincarnation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11492) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-039 — Being Caught In The Language Trap — Or Wittgenstein's Straitjacket — Ernst Pöppel > As most neuronal information processing remains in mental darkness, i.e. happens on an implicit level, it is in my view impossible to make a clear statement why somebody changed his or her mind about something. If somebody gives an explicit reason for having changed the mind about something, I am very suspicious. As "it thinks" all the time in my brain, and as these processes are beyond voluntary control, I am much less transparent to myself as I might want, and this is true for everybody. Thus, I cannot give a good reason why I changed my mind about a strong hypothesis or even belief or perhaps a prejudice in my scientific work which I had until several years ago. - **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:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Being Caught In The Language Trap — Or Wittgenstein's Straitjacket](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11171) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-040 — I Used To Think I Could Change My Mind — Antony Garrett Lisi > As a scientist, I am motivated to build an objective model of reality. Since we always have incomplete information, it is eminently rational to construct a Bayesian network of likelihoods — assigning a probability for each possibility, supported by a chain of priors. When new facts arise, or if new conditional relationships are discovered, these probabilities are adjusted accordingly — our minds should change. When judgment or action is required, it is based on knowledge of these probabilities. This method of logical inference and prediction is the sine qua non of rational thought, and the method all scientists aspire to employ. However, the ambivalence associated with an even probability distribution makes it terribly difficult for an ideal scientist to decide where to go for dinner. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [I Used To Think I Could Change My Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11339) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-041 — Planned Obsolescence? The Four-Year Itch — Helen Fisher > I was so disappointed. I mulled about this endlessly. My friend used to wave his hand over my face, saying, "Earth to Helen; earth to Helen." Why do so many men and women divorce during and around the 4-year mark; at the height of their reproductive years; and often with a single child? It seemed like such an unstable reproductive strategy. Then suddenly I got that "ah-ha" moment: Women in hunting and gathering societies breastfeed around the clock, eat a low-fat diet and get a lot of exercise — habits that tend to inhibit ovulation. As a result, they regularly space their children about four years apart. Thus, the modern duration of many marriages—about four years—conforms to the traditional period of human birth spacing, four years. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Planned Obsolescence? The Four-Year Itch](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11507) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-042 — The Death of the Dinosaurs — Scott Sampson > Instead, many dinosaur species appear to have existed for relatively short durations (< 1 million years), with some geologic units preserving a succession of relatively short-lived faunas. So, even within the well sampled Western Interior of North America (let alone the rest of the world, for which we currently have little hard data), I see no grounds for arguing that dinosaurs were undergoing a slow, attritional demise. Other groups, like plants, also seem to have been doing fine in the interval leading up to that fateful day 65.5 million years ago. Finally, extraordinary events demand extraordinary explanations, and it does not seem parsimonious to make an argument for a lethal cascade of agents when compelling evidence exists for a single agent capable of doing the job on its own. - **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:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Death of the Dinosaurs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11186) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-043 — Should I be thinking about quantum gravity? — John Baez > One of the big problems in physics — perhaps the biggest! — is figuring out how our two current best theories fit together. On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track — but until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both, our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematical Physicist, U.C. Riverside - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Should I be thinking about quantum gravity?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11356) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-044 — The Myth of the "Open Mind" — Steve Nadis > In the decades since, I've learned that while this may be true in many instances, oftentimes it's not. When it comes to the biggest, most contentious issues in physics and cosmology — such as the validity of inflationary theory, string theory, or the multiverse/landscape scenario — the image of the objective truth seeker, standing above the fray, calmly sifting through the evidence without preconceptions or prejudice, may be less accurate than the adversarial model of our justice system. Both sides, to the extent there are sides on these matters, are constantly assembling their briefs, trying to convince themselves as well as the jury at large, while at the same time looking for flaws in the arguments of the opposing counsel. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor to Astronomy Magazine and a freelance writer - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Myth of the "Open Mind"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11522) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-045 — Futurist, Business Strategist; Cofounder. Global Business Network, a Monitor Company; Author, The Long Boom — Peter Schwartz > What led to the change of view? First I came to believe that the likelihood of major climate related catastrophes was increasing rapidly and that they were likely to occur much sooner than the simple linear models of the IPCC indicated. My analysis developed as a result of work we did for the defense and intelligence community on the national security implications of climate change. Many regions of the Earth are likely to experience an increasing frequency of extreme weather events. These catastrophic events include megastorms, super tornados, torrential rains and floods, extended droughts, ecosystem disruptions all added to steadily rising sea levels. It also became clear that human induced climate change is ever more at the causal center of the story. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Futurist, Business Strategist; Cofounder. Global Business Network, a Monitor Company; Author, The Long Boom](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11202) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-046 — Retired Physicist & Writer; Coauthor (with John Archibald Wheeler), Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics — Kenneth W. Ford > Now I have changed my mind, and I have changed it because of evidence, which is what we scientists are supposed to do. Various examples of cheating, some of them quite serious, have come to light in the last few decades, and misbehaviors in earlier times have been reported as well. Scientists are, as the saying goes, "only human," which, in my opinion, is neither an excuse nor an adequate explanation. Unfortunately, scientists are now subjected to greater competitive pressures, financial and otherwise, than was typical when I was starting out. Some — a few — succumb. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Retired Director of the American Institute of Physics - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Retired Physicist & Writer; Coauthor (with John Archibald Wheeler), Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11372) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-047 — What created the structure of the universe? — Paul J. Steinhardt > The process repeats itself over and over, with the number of pockets and the volume of surrounding space increasing from moment to moment. Due to random quantum fluctuations, pockets with all kinds of properties are produced — some flat, but some curved; some with variations in temperature and density like what we observe, but some not; some with forces and physical laws like those we experience, but some with different laws. The alarming result is that there are an infinite number of pockets of each type and, despite over a decade of attempts to avoid the situation, no mathematical way of deciding which is more probable has been shown to exist. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [What created the structure of the universe?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11537) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-048 — The Impressionable Brain — Marcel Kinsbourne > External event are "represented" by the patterns of neuronal activity that they engender in sensory cortex. These representations also incorporate the actions that the percepts potentially afford. This "enactive coding" or "common coding" of input implies a propensity in the observer's brain to imitate the actions of others (consciously or unconsciously). This propensity need not result in overt imitation. Prefrontal cortex is thought to hold these impulses to imitate in check. Nonetheless, the fact that these action circuits have been activated, lowers their threshold by subtle increments as the experience in question is repeated over and over again, and the relative loading of synaptic weights in brain circuitry become correspondingly adjusted. Mirror neurons exemplify this type of functioning, which extends far beyond individual circuits to all cell assemblies that can form representations, - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, The New School; Co-author, Children's Learning and Attention Problems - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Impressionable Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11217) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-049 — Science Philanthropist — Unattributed Edge contributor > The question presupposes a well defined "you", and an implied ability that is under "your" control to change your "mind". The "you" I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends , in hierarchal structures,) i.e. suicide bombers, believe their sacrifice is for the other parts of their "you". The question carries with it an intention that I believe is out of one's control. My mind changed as a result of its interaction with its environment. Why? because it is a part of it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science Philanthropist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11387) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-050 — Professor of Journalism, New York University; formerly journalist, Science magazine; Author, Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea — Charles Seife > In a democracy, ideas are protected. It's the sacred right of a citizen to hold — and to disseminate — beliefs that the majority disagrees with, ideas that are abhorrent, ideas that are wrong. However, scientists are not free to be completely open minded; a scientist stops becoming a scientist if he clings to discredited notions. The basic scientific urge to falsify, to disprove, to discredit ideas clashes with the democratic drive to tolerate and protect them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Professor of Journalism, New York University; formerly journalist, Science magazine; Author, Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11551) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-051 — Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy — Kevin Kelly > Everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it. All the attempts at headless collective writing I had been involved with in the past only generated forgettable trash. Why would anything online be any different? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11232) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-052 — Mathematician; Executive Director, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford; Author, The — Keith Devlin > What is the nature of mathematics? Becoming a mathematician in the 1960s, I swallowed hook, line, and sinker the Platonistic philosophy dominant at the time, that the objects of mathematics (the numbers, the geometric figures, the topological spaces, and so forth) had a form of existence in some abstract ("Platonic") realm. Their existence was independent of our existence as living, cognitive creatures, and searching for new mathematical knowledge was a process of explorative discovery not unlike geographic exploration or sending out probes to distant planets. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Mathematician; Executive Director, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford; Author, The](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11402) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-053 — Computation as the Ultimate Metaphor — Rodney A. Brooks > If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950's I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand after a talk I had given at the University of Utah and asked a question I had been waiting for for a couple of years: "Isn't the human brain just like the world wide web?". The brain always seems to be one of the most advanced technologies that we humans currently have. - **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:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Computation as the Ultimate Metaphor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11249) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-054 — Social psychologist, Hope College; author, Psychology, 8th edition — David G. Myers > • newborns are not the blank slates I once presumed, • electroconvulsive therapy often alleviates intractable depression, • economic growth has not improved our morale, • the automatic unconscious mind dwarfs the controlled conscious mind, • traumatic experiences rarely get repressed, • personality is unrelated to birth order, • most folks have high self-esteem (which sometimes causes problems), • opposites do not attract, • sexual orientation is a natural, enduring disposition (most clearly so for men), not a choice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Social psychologist, Hope College; author, Psychology, 8th edition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11418) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-055 — The Science of Self-deception Requires a Deep Understanding of Biology — Robert Trivers > One thing I never imagined was that the immune system would be a vital component of any science of self-deception, yet two lines of work within psychology make this clear. Richard Davidson and co-workers have shown that relatively positive, up, approach-seeking people are more likely to be left-brain activated (as measured by EEG) and show stronger immune responses to a novel challenge (flu vaccine) than are avoidance, negative emotion (depression, anxiety) right-brained people. At the same time, James Pennebaker and colleagues have shown that the very act of repressing information from consciousness lowers immune function while sharing information with others (or even a diary) has the opposite effect. Why should the immune system be so important and why should it react in this way? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University; Author, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Science of Self-deception Requires a Deep Understanding of Biology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11264) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-056 — Homeopathic Bias and Language Origins — Daniel L. Everett > At the same time, I adhered to a value common in the day-to-day business of scientific research, namely, that changing one's mind is alright for little matters but is suspect when it comes to big questions. Take a theory that is compatible with either conclusion 'x' or conclusion 'y'. First you believed 'x'. Then you received new information and you believed 'y'. This is a little change. And it is a natural form of learning - a change in behavior resulting from exposure to new information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Homeopathic Bias and Language Origins](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11433) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-057 — The World in the Brain — Stephen M. Kosslyn > I've changed my mind. I don't think it's possible to understand events at any one level of analysis without taking into account what occurs at other levels. In particular, I'm now convinced that at least some aspects of the structure and function of the brain can only be understood by situating the brain in a specific cultural context. I'm not simply saying that the brain has evolved to function in a specific type of environment (an idea that forms a mainstay of evolutionary psychology and some areas of computer vision, where statistics of the natural environment are used to guide processing). Rather, I'm saying that to understand how any specific brain functions, we need to understand how that person was raised, and currently functions, in the surrounding culture. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The World in the Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11111) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-058 — Good Old Stuff Sucks — Stewart Brand > Remodeling an old farmhouse two years ago and replacing its sash windows, I discovered the current state of window technology. A standard Andersen window, factory-made exactly to the dimensions you want, has superb insulation qualities; superb hinges, crank, and lock; a flick-in, flick-out screen; and it looks great. The same goes for the new kinds of doors, kitchen cabinetry, and even furniture feet that are available — all drastically improved. - **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:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Good Old Stuff Sucks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10825) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-059 — A Big Mind Change At Age 10: Vacuums Don't Suck! — Alan Kay > At age 10 in 1950, one of the department stores had a pneumatic tube system for moving receipts and money from counters to the cashier's office. I loved this and tried to figure out how it worked The clerks in the store knew all about it. "Vacuum", they said, "Vacuum sucks the canisters, just like your mom's vacuum cleaner". But how does it work, I asked? "Vacuum", they said, "Vacuum, does it all". This was what adults called "an explanation"! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding member of Xerox PARC; President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Big Mind Change At Age 10: Vacuums Don't Suck!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10966) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-060 — Exchanging Your Mind — Gary Klein > Going back over the data we resolved each of these mysteries. They were using their years of experience to rapidly size up situations. The patterns they had acquired suggested typical ways of reacting. But they still needed to evaluate the options they identified. They did so by imagining what might happen if they carried out the action in the context of their situation. If it worked, they proceeded. If it almost worked then they looked for ways to repair any weaknesses or else looked at other typical reactions until they found one that satisfied them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Exchanging Your Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11125) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-061 — Human Spaceflight — Oliver Morton > I have, falteringly and with various intermediary about-faces and caveats, changed my mind about human spaceflight. I am of the generation to have had its childhood imagination stoked by the sight of Apollo missions on the television — I can't put hand on heart and say I remember the Eagle landing, but I remember the sights of the moon relayed to our homes. I was fascinated by space and only through that, by way of the science fiction that a fascination with space inexorably led to, by science. And astronauts were what space was about. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief News and Features Editor - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Human Spaceflight](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10839) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-062 — From A Simple Truth To — Diane F. Halpern > I am a feminist, a product of the 60s, who believed that group differences in intelligence or most any other trait are mostly traceable to the lifetime of experiences that mold us into the people we are and will be. Of course, I never doubted the basic premises of evolution, but the lessons that I learned from evolution favor the idea that the brain and behavior are adaptable. Hunter-gatherers never solved calculus problems or traveled to the moon, so I find little in our ancient past to explain these modern-day achievements. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Claremont McKenna College; Past-president, American Psychological Association; Author, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [From A Simple Truth To](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10981) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-063 — Quantum Mechanical Engineer, MIT, Author, Programming the Universe — Seth Lloyd > Your average MIT undergraduate is pretty technologically adept. In the old days, freshmen used to arrive MIT having disassembled and reassembled tractors and cars; slightly later on, they arrived having built ham radios and guitar amplifiers; more recently, freshmen and fresh women were showing up with a scary facility with computers. Nowadays, few of them have used a screwdriver (except maybe to install some more memory in their laptop), but they are eager to learn how robots work, and raring to build one themselves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Quantum Mechanical Engineer, MIT, Author, Programming the Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11139) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-064 — Generalization — Judith Rich Harris > I am not, of course, the only one in the world who has given up the belief in ubiquitous generalization, but if we formed a club, we could probably hold meetings in my kitchen. Confirmation bias — the tendency to notice things that support one's assumptions and to ignore or explain away anything that doesn't fit — keeps most people faithful to what they learned in intro psych. They observe that the child who is agreeable or timid or conscientious at home tends, to a certain extent, to behave in a similar manner outside the home, and they interpret this correlation as evidence that the child learns patterns of behavior at home which she then carries along with her to other situations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Generalization](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10853) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-065 — Climate Change: Warming Up To The Evidence — Stephen Schneider > Ironically, inside the scientific world, this switch of sign of projected effects is viewed as precisely what responsible scientists must do when the facts change. Not only did I change my mind, but published almost immediately what had changed and how that played out over time. Scientists have no crystal ball, but we do have modeling methods that are the closest approximation available. They can't give us truth, but they can tell us the logical consequences of explicit assumptions. Those who update their conclusions explicitly as facts evolve are much more likely to be a credible source than those who stick to old stories for political consistency. Two cheers for the scientific method! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** climatologist, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Climate Change: Warming Up To The Evidence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10995) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-066 — Evolution of Faith In Experiments — George Church > A depressingly small bit of medical practice is based on randomized placebo-controlled, double-blind studies. In this age of vast electronic documentation is there a list of which medical "facts" have achieved this level and which have not? Other times experiments in the usual sense can't be done, e.g. huge fractions of astronomical and biological evolution are far away in space and time. Nevertheless, both of these fields can inspire experiments. I've done hands-on measurements of gravitation with massive lab spheres and mutation/selection evolution in lab bacteria. Such microcosmic simulacra "changed my mind" subtly and allowed me to connect to the larger-scale (non-experimental) facts. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project; Co-author (with Ed Regis), Regenesis - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Evolution of Faith In Experiments](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10867) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-067 — Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands — Xeni Jardin > My co-editors and I debated, we brainstormed, we observed other big sites that included some kind of community forum or comments feature. Some relied on voting systems to "score" whether a comment is of value — this felt clinical, cold, like grading what a friend says to you in conversation. Dialogue shouldn't be a beauty contest. Other sites used other automated systems to rank the relevance of a speech thread. None of this felt natural to us, or an effective way to prevent the toxic sludge buildup. So we stalled for years, and our blog remained more monologue than dialogue. That felt unnatural, too. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tech Culture Journalist; Partner, Contributor, Co-editor, Boing Boing; Executive Producer, host, Boing Boing Video - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11009) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-068 — I have changed my mind about cortical neurons and now think that they are far more capable than we ever imagined. — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Theoretical analysis of neural signals in large networks assumed statistical randomness in the responses of neurons. These theories used the average firing rates of neurons as the primary statistical variable. Individual spikes and the times when they occurred were not relevant in these theories. In contrast, the timing of single spikes in flies has been shown to carry specific information about sensory stimuli important for guiding the behavior of flies, and in mammals the timing of spikes in the peripheral auditory system carried information about the spatial locations of sound sources. However, cortical neurons did not seem to care about the timing of spikes. - **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:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I have changed my mind about cortical neurons and now think that they are far more capable than we ever imagined.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10881) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-069 — There is nothing to add to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. — Carlo Rovelli > Long time has passed, and I have changed my mind. Ted's arguments have finally convinced me: I was wrong, and he was right. I have slowly came to realize that in its most common textbook version, quantum mechanics makes sense as a theory of a small portion of the universe, a "system", only under the assumption that something else in the universe fails to obey quantum mechanics. Hence it becomes self contradictory, in its usual version, if we take it as a general description of all physical systems of the universe. Or, at least, there is still something key to understand, with respect to it. - **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:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [There is nothing to add to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11024) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-070 — Sports and fraternities are not so bad — Jonathan Haidt > I was born without the neural cluster that makes boys find pleasure in moving balls and pucks around through space, and in talking endlessly about men who get paid to do such things. I always knew I could never join a fraternity or the military because I wouldn't be able to fake the sports talk. By the time I became a professor I had developed the contempt that I think is widespread in academe for any institution that brings young men together to do groupish things. Primitive tribalism, I thought. Initiation rites, alcohol, sports, sexism, and baseball caps turn decent boys into knuckleheads. I'd have gladly voted to ban fraternities, ROTC, and most sports teams from my university. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Sports and fraternities are not so bad](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10882) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-071 — AI? — Roger Schank > When reporters interviewed me in the 70's and 80's about the possibilities for Artificial Intelligence I would always say that we would have machines that are as smart as we are within my lifetime. It seemed a safe answer since no one could ever tell me I was wrong. But I no longer believe that will happen. One reason is that I am a lot older and we are barely closer to creating smart machines. - **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:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [AI?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11038) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-072 — Brain Plasticity — Leo M. Chalupa > More recently, the field of brain plasticity has shifted to studies demonstrating a remarkable degree of change in the connections and functional properties of mature and even aged brains. Thousands of published papers have now appeared on this topic, many by reputable scientists, and this has lead to a host of books, programs and even commercial enterprises touting the malleability of the brain with “proper” training. One is practically made to feel guilty for not taking advantage of this thriving store of information to improve one’s own brain or those of one’s children and grandchildren. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Brain Plasticity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10754) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-073 — Changing my Mind — Patrick Bateson* > For many years what had been good enough for Darwin was good enough for me. I too described myself as an agnostic. I had been brought up in a Christian culture and some of the most rational humanists I knew were believers. I loved the music and art that had been inspired by a belief in God and saw no hypocrisy in participating in the great carol services held in the Chapel of King's College Cambridge. I did not accept the views of some of my scientific colleagues that the march of science has disposed of religion. The wish that I and many biologists had to understand biological evolution was not the same as the wish had by those with deep religious conviction to understand the meaning of life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Ethology, Cambridge University; Co-author, Design for a Life (*Deceased) - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Changing my Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10896) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-074 — Changing My Mind About the Mind-Body Problem — John Horgan > In the same way, the neural code is unlikely to resolve the mind-body problem to everyone's satisfaction. When it comes to consciousness, many of us seek not an explanation but a revelation, which dispels mystery like sun burning off a morning fog. And yet we will embrace a neural-code theory of mind if it works — that is, if it helps us predict, heal and enhance ourselves. If we can control our minds, who cares if we still cannot comprehend them? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Changing My Mind About the Mind-Body Problem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11052) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-075 — The Religious Politics of Fictive Kinship — Scott Atran > Social psychology tends to support the finding that "groupthink" often trumps individual volition and knowledge, whether in our society or any other. But for Americans bred on a constant diet of individualism the group is not where one generally looks for explanation. This was particularly true for me, but the data caused me to change my mind. - **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:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Religious Politics of Fictive Kinship](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10768) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-076 — So far, I've changed my mind twice about God. — Alan Alda > The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong. The problem for me was that just as I couldn't find any evidence that there was a god, I couldn't find any that there wasn't a god. I would have to call myself an agnostic. At first, this seemed a little wimpy, but after a while I began to hope it might be an example of Feynman's heroic willingness to accept, even glory in, uncertainty. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [So far, I've changed my mind twice about God.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10910) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-077 — What I've Changed My Mind About — Sherry Turkle > In the past, because I didn't criticize but tried to analyze, some of my colleagues found me complicit with the agenda of technology-builders. I didn't like that much, but understood that this was perhaps the price to pay for maintaining my distance, as Goldilock's wolf would say, "the better to hear them with." This year I realized that I had changed my stance. In studying reactions to advanced robots, robots that look you in the eye, remember your name, and track your motions, I found more people who were considering such robots as friends, confidants, and as they imagined technical improvements, even as lovers. I became less distanced. I began to think about technological promiscuity. Are we so lonely that we will really love whatever is put in front of us? - **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:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [What I've Changed My Mind About](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11066) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-078 — The eradication of irrational thinking is (not) inevitable (it will require some serious work) — Marco Iacoboni > Some time ago I thought that rational, enlightened thinking would eventually eradicate irrational thinking and supernatural beliefs. How could it be otherwise? Scientists and enlightened people have facts and logical arguments on their side, whereas people 'on the other side' have only unprovable beliefs and bad reasoning. I guess I was wrong, way wrong. Thirty years later, irrational thinking and supernatural beliefs are much stronger than they used to be, permeate ours and other societies and it does not seem they will go away any time soon. How is it possible? Shouldn't 'history' always move forward? What went wrong? What can we do to fix this backward movement toward the irrational? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The eradication of irrational thinking is (not) inevitable (it will require some serious work)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10783) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-079 — Have Humans Stopped Evolving? — Steven Pinker > If these results hold up, and apply to psychologically relevant brain function (as opposed to disease resistance, skin color, and digestion, which we already know have evolved in recent millennia), then the field of evolutionary psychology might have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over and done with 10-000 — 50,000 years ago. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Have Humans Stopped Evolving?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10924) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-080 — The Benefit of Being Able to Change My Mind — Daniel Gilbert > In 2002, Jane Ebert and I discovered that people are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn't undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. As such, they were more satisfied when they made irrevocable than revocable decisions. Ironically, subjects did not realize this would happen and strongly preferred to have the opportunity to change their minds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Benefit of Being Able to Change My Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11081) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-081 — The Human Recipe — Richard Wrangham > Cooked food has so many important biological effects that its adoption should be clearly marked in the fossil record by signals of a reduced digestive system and increased energy use. While such signs are clear at the origin of Homo erectus, they are not found later in human evolution. The match between the biological merits of cooked food and the evolutionary changes in Homo erectus is thus so obvious that except for a scientific obstacle, I believe it would have been noticed long ago. The obstacle is the insistence of archaeologists that the control of fire is not firmly evidenced before about a quarter of a million years ago. As a result of this archaeological caution, the idea that humans could have used fire before about 250,000 to 500,000 years ago has long been sidelined. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, Curator of Primate Behavioral Biology at Harvard University; Author, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Human Recipe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10795) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-082 — I used to be a committed Platonist. — Paul Davies > The fashionable explanation for this — that there is a multiplicity of laws in a multiplicity of parallel universes, with each set of laws fixed and perfect within its host universe — is a nice try, but still leaves a lot unexplained. And simply saying that the laws "just are" seems no better than declaring "God made them that way." - **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:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I used to be a committed Platonist.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10938) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-083 — What is the Universe Made of and How Will it End? — Lawrence M. Krauss > Like 99% of particle physicists, and 95% of cosmologist (perhaps 98% of theorists and 90% of observers, to be more specific), I was relatively certain that there was precisely enough matter in the universe to make it geometrically flat. What does geometrically flat mean? Well, according to general relativity it means there is a precise balance between the positive kinetic energy associated with the expansion of space, and the negative potential energy associated with the gravitational attraction of matter in the universe so that the total energy is precisely zero. This is not only mathematically attractive, but in fact the only theory we have that explains why the universe looks the way it does today tends to predict a flat universe today. - **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:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What is the Universe Made of and How Will it End?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11096) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-084 — Being a Heretic is Hard Work — Sean Carroll > Heresy is more romantic than orthodoxy. Nobody roots for Goliath, as Wilt Chamberlain was fond of saying. But in science, ideas tend to grow into orthodoxy for good reasons. They fit the data better than the alternatives. Many casual heretics can't be bothered with all the detailed theoretical arguments and experimental tests that support the models they hope to overthrow — they have a feeling about how the universe should work, and are convinced that history will eventually vindicate them, just as it did Galileo. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, Something Deeply Hidden - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Being a Heretic is Hard Work](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10809) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-085 — Computational Analysis of Language Requires Understanding Language — Marti Hearst > To me, having my worldview entirely altered is among the most fun parts of science. One mind-altering event occurred during graduate school. I was studying the field of Artificial Intelligence with a focus on Natural Language Processing. At that time there were intense arguments amongst computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers about how to represent concepts and knowledge in computers, and if those representations reflected in any realistic way how people represented knowledge. Most researchers thought that language and concepts should be represented in a diffuse manner, distributed across myriad brain cells in a complex network. But some researchers talked about the existence of a "grandmother cell," meaning that one neuron in the brain (or perhaps a concentrated group of neurons) was entirely responsible for representing the concept of, say, your grandmother. I thought this latter view was hogwash. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 138 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Computational Analysis of Language Requires Understanding Language](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10952) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-086 — The Advent of Health Literacy — Gerd Gigerenzer > In World Brain (1938), H. G. Wells predicted that for an educated citizenship in a modern democracy, statistical thinking would be as indispensable as reading and writing. At the beginning of the 21st century, we have succeeded in teaching millions how to read and write, but many of us still don't know how to reason statistically — how to understand risks and uncertainties in our technological world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Advent of Health Literacy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10333) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-087 — More dumbbells but more Nobels: Why men are at the top — Helena Cronin > I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments. After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so. And therefore, even where such differences are modest, the distribution of these 3 Ts among males will necessarily be different from that among females — and so will give rise to notable differences between the two groups. Add to this some bias and barriers — a sexist attitude here, a lack of child-care there. And the sex differences are explained. Or so I thought. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [More dumbbells but more Nobels: Why men are at the top](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-088 — The hardness of the problem of consciousness is the key to its solution — Nicholas Humphrey > In my own research on consciousness, I have changed my mind more than once. I expect it will happen again. But it has not — at least so far — been because I learned any new facts. Contrary to the hopes of neuroscientists on one side, quantum physicists on the other, I'm pretty sure all the facts that we need to solve the hard problem are already familiar to us — if only we could see them for what they are. No magic bullet is going to emerge from the lab, from brain imaging or particle accelerators. Instead, what we are waiting for is merely (!) a revolutionary new way of thinking about things that we all, as conscious creatures, already know — perhaps a way of making those same facts unfamiliar. - **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:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The hardness of the problem of consciousness is the key to its solution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10428) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-089 — That empirical data of journalism are no match for the bigger picture of science — Andrian Kreye > It was hard facts against hard facts. First the visceral experience out in the field first overpowered the raw data of the massive body of scientific research. It still forced me to rethink my hardened stand towards faith. It was hard to let go of the empirical data of experience and accept the hard facts of science. This is a route normally leading from faith to rational thought. No, it hasn't brought me to faith, but I had to acknowledge it's persistence and cultural power. First and foremost it demonstated that the empirical data of journalism are no match for the bigger picture of science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [That empirical data of journalism are no match for the bigger picture of science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10544) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-090 — What Matters — Austin Dacey > In truth, I wasn't thinking through much at the time. Later, as a graduate student of philosophy, I did start to think a lot about science and ethics, and I began to undergo a parallel shift of outlook. Having embraced a thoroughly naturalistic, materialistic worldview, I wondered: If everything is just matter, how could anything really matter? How could values be among the objective furniture of the universe? It is not as if anyone expected physicists to discover, alongside electrons, protons, and neutrons, a new fundamental moral particle--the moron?--which would show up in high magnitudes whenever people did nice things. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Representative to the United Nations for the Center for Inquiry in New York City - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [What Matters](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10264) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-091 — Biologist, University of Minnesota; blogger, Pharyngula — P Z Myers > That flexibility is intrinsic to being human — more, to being conscious. We are (or should be) constantly learning new things, absorbing new information, and reacting to new ideas, so of course we are changing our minds. In the most trivial sense, learning and memory involve a constant remodeling of the fine details of the brain, and the only time the circuitry will stop changing is when we're dead. And in a more profound sense, our major ideas change over time: my 5-year-old self, my 15-year-old self, and my 25-year-old self were very different people with different priorities and different understandings of the world around them than my current 50-year-old self. This is simply in the nature of our existence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Morris - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Biologist, University of Minnesota; blogger, Pharyngula](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10340) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-092 — Russian America — George Dyson > The Russians instituted public education, preservation of the Aleut language through transliteration of religious and other texts into Aleut via an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet, vaccination of the native population against smallpox, and science-based sea mammal conservation policies that were far ahead of their time. There were no such things as "reservations" for the native population in Russian America, and we owe as much to the Russians as to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 that this remains true today. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Russian America](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10684) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-093 — Technology is Not So Bad — Adam Bly > A physicist at CERN said to me recently that they likely wouldn't have built a new $8 billion collider if there was a better way of moving the field forward. The Blue Brain Project is using supercomputers to construct a mind because the neuroscientists involved believe it is the best way of attaining an overall understanding of the brain. Robots, I now appreciate, are not simply novelty items or tools of automation, but can be a way of gaining unique insight into humans. From simulation to supercomputing, technology is now (or at least I now see) one of science's very best friends (I could say the same for the arts). And the design, magnitude, and complexity of these technological feats satisfy my (and our) need for romance in our pursuit of truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Advanced Analytics, Spotify - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Technology is Not So Bad](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10437) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-094 — Breathtaking New Technologies — Linda Stone > Some breathing patterns favor our body's move toward parasympathetic functions and other breathing patterns favor a sympathetic nervous system response. Buteyko (breathing techniques developed by a Russian M.D.), Andy Weil's breathing exercises, diaphragmatic breathing, certain yoga breathing techniques, all have the potential to soothe us, and to help our bodies differentiate when fight or flight is really necessary and when we can rest and digest. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hi-Tech Industry Consultant; Former Executive at Apple Computer and Microsoft Corporation - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Breathtaking New Technologies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10555) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-095 — It's hard to perform ethical research on animals — Daniel Engber > In practice, I found that scientists were far from monolithic in their attitudes towards animal work. (Drosophila researchers had misgivings about the lab across the hall, where technicians perfused the still-beating hearts of mice with chemical fixative; mouse researchers didn't want to implant titanium posts in the skulls of water-starved monkeys.) They weren't animal rights zealots, of course--they had nothing but contempt for the PETA protestors who passed out fliers in front of the lab buildings. But they did have real misgivings about the extent to which biology research might go in its exploitation of living things. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Columnist, Slate - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [It's hard to perform ethical research on animals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10271) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-096 — The Paranormal — Susan Blackmore > "Astral projection!" I thought and then I (or some imagined flying "I") set off across Oxford, over the country, and way beyond. For more than two hours I fell through strange scenes and mystical states, losing space and time, and ultimately my self. It was an extraordinary and life-changing experience. Everything seemed brighter, more real, and more meaningful than anything in ordinary life, and I longed to understand it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Paranormal](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10348) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-097 — The source of long term power — Juan Enriquez > Who eventually survives will be largely driven by understanding and applying digital and life code, by creating robots and nanomaterials, by working inconceivably large data sets and upgrading our brains. Meanwhile many U.S. leaders proudly proclaim no evolution and little knowledge of science. They reflect a core of scared voters experiencing massive disruption and declining wages; that core fears elite education, science, immigrants, open borders, and above all rapid change. As income and knowledge gaps widen, many fall further and further behind; many grow to hate an open, knowledge driven economy. Change is rejected, blocked, vilified. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The source of long term power](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10698) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-098 — Competition in the brain — Daniel C. Dennett > What could a neuron "want"? The energy and raw materials it needs to thrive–just like its unicellular eukaryote ancestors and more distant cousins, the bacteria and archaea. Neurons are robots; they are certainly not conscious in any rich sense–remember, they are eukaryotic cells, akin to yeast cells or fungi. If individual neurons are conscious then so is athlete’s foot. But neurons are, like these mindless but intentional cousins, highly competent agents in a life-or-death struggle, not in the environment between your toes, but in the demanding environment of the brain, where the victories go to those cells that can network more effectively, contribute to more influential trends at the virtual machine levels where large-scale human purposes and urges are discernible. - **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:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Competition in the brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10446) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-099 — The Brain's Schrödinger Equation — Stanislas Dehaene > For many theoretical neuroscientists, it all started twenty five years ago, when John Hopfield made us realize that a network of neurons could operate as an attractor network, driven to optimize an overall energy function which could be designed to accomplish object recognition or memory completion. Then came Geoff Hinton's Boltzmann machine — again, the brain was seen as an optimizing machine that could solve complex probabilistic inferences. Yet both proposals were frameworks rather than laws. Each individual network realization still required the set-up of thousands of ad-hoc connection weights. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Brain's Schrödinger Equation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10566) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-100 — Science as faith — Roger Highfield > The harsh spotlight of the media often encourages them to strike a confident pose even if the facts don't. I am often struck by how facts are ignored, insufficient or even abused. I back well-designed animal research but am puzzled by how scientists chose to ignore the basic fact that vivisection is so inefficient at generating cures for human disease. Intelligent design is for cretins but, despite the endless proselytizing about the success of Darwin - assuming that evolution is a fact - I could still see it being superseded, rather as Einstein's ideas replaced Newton's law of gravity. I believe in man-made global warming but computer-projected facts that purportedly say what is in store for the Earth in the next century leave me cold. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Science as faith](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10278) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-101 — Female Sexual Psychology — David M. Buss > Yet with all these scientific discoveries, I feel that we are still at the beginning of the exploration and humbled by how little we still know. As a researcher focusing on female sexuality, I'm inherently limited by virtue of possessing a male brain. Consequently, I've teamed up with brilliant female research scientists, recruited a team of talented female graduate students, and marshaled much of my research to explore the complexities of female sexual psychology. They have led me to see things previously invisible to my male-blinkered brain. Female sexual psychology is more complex than I previously thought by several orders of magnitude. And still I may be underestimating. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Female Sexual Psychology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10356) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-102 — Falsifiability — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > For one thing, Popper’s characterization of how science is practiced—as a cycle of conjecture and refutation—bears little relation to what goes on in the labs and journals. He describes science as if it was skeet-shooting, as if the only goal of science is to prove that one theory after another is false. But just open a copy of Science. To pick a random example: “In a probabilistic learning task, A1-allele carriers with reduced dopamine D2 receptor densities learned to avoid actions with negative consequences less efficiently.” Not, “We tried to falsify the hypothesis that A1 carriers are less efficient learners, and failed.” Scientists rarely write the way that Popper says they should, and a good Popperian should recognize that the Master may have over-simplified the logic of theory testing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Falsifiability](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10711) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-103 — Culture can change our genes — Nicholas A. Christakis > In short, I have changed my mind about how people come literally to embody the social world around them. I once thought that we internalized cultural factors by forming memories, acquiring language, or bearing emotional and physical marks (of poverty, of conquest). I thought that this was the limit of the ways in which our bodies were shaped by our social environment. In particular, I thought that our genes were historically immutable, and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics. I thought that we as a species evolved over time frames far too long to be influenced by human actions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University; Co-author, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Culture can change our genes](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10456) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-104 — Making and Changing Minds — Mary Catherine Bateson > J.B.S. Haldane was asked once what the natural world suggested about the mind of its Creator, and he replied "an inordinate fondness for beetles." This observation also plays differently for different listeners—a delight in diversity, perhaps, as if the Creator might have spent the first sabbath afternoon resting from his work by playfully exploring the possible ramifications of a single idea (beetles make up roughly one fifth of all known species on the planet, some 350,000 of them)—or a humbling (or humiliating?) lack of preoccupation with our own unique kind, which might prove to be a temporary afterthought, survived only by cockroaches. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emerita, George Mason University; Visiting Scholar, Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College; Author, Composing a Further Life - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Making and Changing Minds](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10578) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-105 — A book on “What is really Science? — Francesco DePretis > In two weeks I finished the book and then my way of thinking changed. I understood that science was not only a pursuit of knowledge but a social process too, with its rules and tricks: a never-ending tale such as human life. I have never forgotten it and since then, my curiosity and passion for science have been rising more and more. Definitely, that book has changed my mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist, La Stampa; Italy Correspondent, Science Magazine - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A book on “What is really Science?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10285) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-106 — Life experience changed my mind — Joseph "Yossi" Vardi > First, all models have certain degree of approximation. Second, at least in operations research, human factors,errors, randomness, unexpected developments, social behaviors, human errors all are influencing the results, or are not accounted for in the modelling. In time I become more skeptical and doubtful. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** chairman of International Technologies - **Extract length:** 44 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Life experience changed my mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10364) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-107 — The soul is in the brain — Eduardo Punset > When the mind is challenged from the outside universe, it searches in its accumulated archives in order to make sense of this new stimulus. This screening of our memory –of our past- produces an immediate answer: the new stimulus either leaves everyone indifferent, or else it blooms into an emotion of love, of pleasure or of sheer curiosity. These are the three touchstones of creativity. So basically, science has discovered that at the very beginning at least, only the past matters. And that holds true also of our future creativity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Spanish Television Presenter; Author, The Happiness Trip - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The soul is in the brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10725) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-108 — The skepticism of believers — Rupert Sheldrake > In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** biologist and author - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The skepticism of believers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10467) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-109 — Astrophysicist, Harvard — Dimitar D. Sasselov > I was not a planetary scientist – stars were my specialty, but I knew my planetary basics – a planet like Jupiter could not possibly exist so close to its star and have a period of 400 days. Some of this I had learned as far back as last year of high school. I did not question it, instead I was questioning my colleague’s claim. He was the first to speak the next day and he began by showing the orbital period for the new planet – it was 4.2 days! The night before, I must have heard “4.2 days”, but being so incredibly foreign to my preconception, my brain had “translated” that number to a more “reasonable” 420 days, or – roughly 400. Deeply held preconceptions can be very powerful. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; Director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; Author, The Life of Super-Earths - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Astrophysicist, Harvard](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10292) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-110 — Greenland changed my mind — William H. Calvin > Back in 1968, when I first heard about global warming while visiting the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, almost everyone thought that serious problems were several centuries in the future. That's because no one realized how ravenous the world's appetite for coal and oil would become during a mere 40 years. They also thought that problems would develop slowly. Wrong again. I tuned into abrupt climate change about 1984, when the Greenland ice cores showed big jumps in temperature and snowfall, stepping up and down in a mere decade but lasting centuries. I worried about global warming setting off another flip but I still didn't revise my notions about a slow time scale for the present greenhouse warming. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Greenland changed my mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10590) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-111 — Mother Nature is Not Our Friend — Sam Harris > Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature. I imagined that there were real boundaries between the natural and the artificial, between one species and another, and thought that, with the advent of genetic engineering, we would be tinkering with life at our peril. I now believe that this romantic view of Nature is a stultifying and dangerous mythology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Mother Nature is Not Our Friend](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10374) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-112 — The Convergence of Belief Change — John Allen Paulos > An important definition allows for a slightly fuller statement. Information is termed "common knowledge" among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is much more than "mutual knowledge," which requires only that the parties know the particular bit of information, not that they be aware of the others' knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Convergence of Belief Change](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10740) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-113 — Seeing Through a Carbon Lens — Christopher J. Anderson > Aside from whether Apple matters (whoops!), the biggest thing I've changed my mind about is climate change. There was no one thing that convinced me to flip from wait-and-see to the-time-for-debate-is-over. Instead, there were three things, which combined for me in early 2006. There was, of course, the scientific evidence, which kept getting more persuasive. There was also economics, and the recognition that moving to alternative, sustainable energy was going to be cheaper over the long run as oil got more expensive. And finally there was geopolitics, with ample evidence of how top-down oil riches destabilized a region and then the world. No one reason was enough to win me over to total energy regime change, but together they seemed win-win-win. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, TED conferences, TED Talks; author, TED Talks - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Seeing Through a Carbon Lens](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10478) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-114 — Computer Scientist and Musician; Columnist, Discover Magazine — Jaron Lanier > I did not agree. In fact, I had strong arguments as to why this ought not to work. There was evidence that the brain created distinct "homuncular personas" for virtual world experiences, and reasons to believe that these personas were tied to increasingly distinct bundles of emotional patterns. Therefore, emotional patterns attached to real world situations would, I surmised, remain attached to those situations. The earliest research on PTSD treatment in VR seemed awfully shaky to me, and I was not very encouraging to younger researchers who were interested in it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Computer Scientist and Musician; Columnist, Discover Magazine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10299) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-115 — Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Science Team Leader; Director CICLOPS, Boulder CO; Adjunct Professor, University of Colorado — Carolyn Porco > I used to think that the power of science to dissect, inform, illuminate and clarify, its venerable record in improving the human condition, and its role in enabling the technological progress of the modern world were all so glaringly obvious that no one could reasonably question its hallowed position in human culture as the pre-eminent device for separating truth from falsehood. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Team Leader; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Science Team Leader; Director CICLOPS, Boulder CO; Adjunct Professor, University of Colorado](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10602) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-116 — Smothering Science with Silence — Robert Shapiro > I was aware earlier of the case of Gregor Mendel. His fundamental genetic experiments with peas were ignored for a third of a century. But he had published them in an obscure journal, in an age when meetings and libraries were fewer, and journals were circulated by land mail. When his ideas were rediscovered at the start of the twentieth century, Thomas Hunt Morgan set out to disprove them, and ended up performing experiments that greatly strengthened their case. A Nobel Prize was his reward. He wrote in a textbook: "The investigator must… cultivate also a skeptical state of mind toward all hypotheses — especially his own — and be ready to abandon them the moment the evidence pointed the other way." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Senior Research Scientist, New York University; Author, Planetary Dreams - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Smothering Science with Silence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10383) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-117 — The Science Formerly Known as Religion — Frank Wilczek > I was an earnest student in Catechism class. The climax of our early training, as thirteen year-olds, was an intense retreat in preparation for the sacrament of Confirmation. Even now I vividly remember the rapture of belief, the glow everyday events acquired when I felt that they reflected a grand scheme of the universe, in which I had a personal place. Soon afterward, though, came disillusionment. As I learned more about science, some of the concepts and explanations in the ancient sacred texts came to seem clearly wrong; and as I learned more about history and how it is recorded, some of the stories in those texts came to seem very doubtful. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Science Formerly Known as Religion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10489) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-118 — Physicist, Columbia University; Author, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines — Janna Levin > People have said to me they were very surprised (disappointed) that I suggested the universe was finite. The infinite universe, they believed, was full of infinite potential and so philosophically (emotionally) so much richer and more thrilling. I explained that my suggestion of a finite universe was not a moral failing on my part, nor a consequence of diminished imagination. More thrilling was the knowledge that it does not matter what I believe. It does not matter if I prefer an infinite universe or a finite universe. Nature is not designed to satisfy our personal longings. Nature is what she is and it's a privilege merely to be privy to her mathematical codes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Barnard College of Columbia University; Author, Black Hole Survival Guide; Director of Sciences, Pioneer Works - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Physicist, Columbia University; Author, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10307) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-119 — The Mechanical Worldview — Brian Goodwin > I have changed my mind about the general validity of the mechanical worldview that underlies the modern scientific understanding of natural processes. Trained in biology and mathematics, I have used the scientific approach to the explanation of natural phenomena during most of my career. The basic assumption is that whatever properties and behaviours have emerged naturally during cosmic evolution can all be understood in terms of the motions and interactions of inanimate entities such as elementary particles, atoms, molecules, membranes and organelles, cells, organs, organisms, and so on. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Mechanical Worldview](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10615) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-120 — The question of objects — Hans Ulrich Obrist > In a converation I had with her some months ago Doris Lessing questionned the future of museums. It's not that she's fundamentally opposed to these institutions, but she's worried that their prioritisation of material objects from the past may not be enough to convey functional meaning to tomorrow's generations. Her 1999 novel, Mara and Dann, is premised on the aftermath of an ice age thousands of years into the future that has eradicated the entirety of life in the northern hemisphere. Her protagonists, long since confined to the other side of the globe, embark upon a journey but they are at a loss with the cultural remnants; they have no grounding in its *artefacts and cities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The question of objects](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10392) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-121 — Editor-in Chief, Nature — Philip Campbell > I became interested in the issues surrounding cognitive enhancement as one example of debates about human enhancement — debates that can only get more vigorous in future. It's also an example of a topic in which both natural and social sciences can contribute to better regulation — another theme that interests me. Thinking about the issues and looking at the evidence-based literatures made me realise how shallow was my own instinctive aversion to the use of such drugs by healthy people. It also led to a thoughtful article by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir in Nature (20 December 2007) that triggered many blog discussions. - **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:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Editor-in Chief, Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10500) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-122 — We Should Take the 'Posthuman' Era Seriously — Martin Rees > Our medieval forebears in Europe had a cosmic perspective that was a million-fold more constricted than ours. Their entire cosmology — from creation to apocalypse — spanned only a few thousand years. Today, the stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are part of common culture — except among some creationists and fundamentalists. Moreover, we are mindful of immense future potential. It seems absurd to regard humans as the culmination of the evolutionary tree. Any creatures witnessing the Sun's demise 6 billion years hence won't be human — they could be as different from us as we are from slime mould. - **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:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [We Should Take the 'Posthuman' Era Seriously](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10315) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-123 — Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Warped Passages — Lisa Randall > Why are these angles important? First of all neutrino mixing does in fact explain the missing neutrinos from the sun and from the atmosphere. But these angles are also are an important clue as to the nature of the fundamental particles of which all known matter is made. One of the chief open questions about these particles is why there are three "copies" of the known particle types — that is heavier versions with identical charges? Another is why do these different versions have different masses? And a third question is why do these particles mix in the way they have been measured to do? When we understand the answers to these questions we will have a much greater insight into the fundamental nature of all known matter. We don't know yet if we'll get the right answers but these questions pose important challenges. And when we find the answer is is likely at this point that neutrinos will provide a clue. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 162 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Warped Passages](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10627) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-124 — From Revolutionary to Evolutionary — Brian Eno > Experimental art and experimental politics have traditionally been convivial bedfellows, though usually, in my opinion, with very little benefit to each other. George Bernard Shaw and his circle fervently supported Stalin against the mounting tide of evidence; the Mitfords supported Hitler, and numerous gifted Italian poets and artists were persuaded by Fascism. Similarly, in the late sixties and early seventies the avant garde art scene in London was overwhelmed with admiration for Chairman Mao. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [From Revolutionary to Evolutionary](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10401) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-125 — I was skeptical of the term — Tim O'Reilly > Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's young founder and CEO, woke up the industry when he began speaking of "the social graph" — that's computer-science-speak for the mathematical structure that maps the relationships between people participating in Facebook — as the core of his platform. There is real power in thinking of today's leading internet applications explicitly as social software. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.; Author, WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [I was skeptical of the term](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10511) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-126 — Editor, Release 1.0; Trustee, Long Now Foundation; Author, Release 2.0 — Esther Dyson > In short, for many users the Web is becoming a mirror, with users in control, rather than a heavily surveilled stage. The question isn't how to protect users' privacy, but rather how to give them better tools to control their own data - not by selling privacy or by getting them to "sell" their data, , but by feeding their natural fascination with themselves and allowing them to manage their own presence. What once seemed like an onerous, weird task becomes akin to self-grooming online. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Editor, Release 1.0; Trustee, Long Now Foundation; Author, Release 2.0](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10319) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-127 — The Radiant and Infectious Web — Nicholas G. Carr > I now see that I was naive. Like many others, I mistakenly interpreted a technical structure as a metaphor for human liberty. In recent years, we have seen clear signs that while the Net may be a decentralized communications system, its technical and commercial workings actually promote the centralization of power and control. Look, for instance, at the growing concentration of web traffic. During the five years from 2002 through 2006, the number of Internet sites nearly doubled, yet the concentration of traffic at the ten most popular sites nonetheless grew substantially, from 31% to 40% of all page views, according to the research firm Compete. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Utopia is Creepy - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Radiant and Infectious Web](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10641) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-128 — Reassessing Relatedness — Seirian Sumner > On the back of robust experiments like these, I have changed my mind about relatedness being the primary dictator of social evolution. Insects are unable to discriminate relatedness on an individual level. Instead, relatedness may act at the colony/population level, or simply in distinguishing kin from non-kin. This make sense. An individual-level kin discrimination mechanism is vulnerable to invasion by an occasional nepotist, who would favor its closest relatives over others. As the gene for nepotism spreads, the variation on which the kin-discrimination is based (e.g. chemical or visual cues) will disappear and individuals will no longer be able to tell kin from non-kin, let alone full siblings from half siblings: sociality breaks down. We knew this long before many of the kin-discrimination experiments were done, but optimism perseveres until enough evidence pervades. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Reader, Behavioral Ecology, University College London - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Reassessing Relatedness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10410) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-129 — Neuroeconomics really explains human economic behavior — James Geary > Neuroeconomics mixes brain science with the dismal science — throwing in some evolutionary psychology and elements of prospect theory as developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky — to explain the emotional and psychological quirks of human economic behavior. To take a common example — playing the stock market. Our brains are always prospecting for pattern. Researchers at Duke University showed people randomly generated sequences of circles and squares. Whenever two consecutive circles or squares appeared, the subjects' nucleus accumbens — the part of the brain that's active whenever a stimulus repeats itself — went into overdrive, suggesting the participants expected a third circle or square to continue the sequence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; Author, Wit's End - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Neuroeconomics really explains human economic behavior](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10522) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-130 — I used to think what I am doing is — Anton Zeilinger > Then a new surprising development started. The scientific community discovered that the same fundamental phenomena of quantum physics suddenly became relevant for more and more novel ways of transmitting and processing of information. We now have the completely new field of quantum information science where some of the basic concepts are quantum cryptography, quantum computation and even quantum teleportation. All this points us towards a new information technology where the same strange fundamental phenomena which attracted me initially into the field are essential. Quantum randomness makes it possible for us in quantum cryptography to send messages such that they are secure against unauthorized third parties. Quantum entanglement, called by Einstein "spooky action at a distance" makes quantum teleportation possible. And quantum computation builds on all counterintuitive features of the quantum world together. When journalists ask me today what the use of my research is I proudly tell them of my conviction that we well have a full quantum information technology in the future, though its specific features are still very much to be developed. So, never say that your research is "useless". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation - **Extract length:** 182 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I used to think what I am doing is](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10326) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-131 — Curiosity is addictive, and this is not an entirely good thing — Aubrey de Grey > The words "science" and "technology," or equivalently the words "research" and "development," are used in the same breath so readily that one might easily presume that they are joined at the hip: that their goals are indistinguishable, and that those who are good at one are, if not necessarily equally good at the other, at least quite good at evaluating the quality of work in the other. I grew up with this assumption, but the longer I work at the interface between science and technology the more I find myself having to accept that it is false — that most, scientists are rather poor at the type of thinking that identifies efficient new ways to get things done, and that, likewise, technologists are mostly not terribly good at identifying efficient ways to find things out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Curiosity is addictive, and this is not an entirely good thing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10656) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-132 — Trusting Experts — Paul W. Ewald > Kuhn's idea seemed sufficiently plausible to lead me to generally trust the consensus of experts in disciplines outside my area of expertise. I still think that it is wise to trust the experts when their profession has a good understanding of the processes under consideration. This situation applies to experts on car maintenance, for example, because cars were made by people who shared their knowledge about the function of car parts, and top notch car mechanics learn this information. It also applies generally to the main principles of mechanical and electrical engineering, biology, physics, and chemistry, because these principles are tested directly or indirectly by the countless studies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Trusting Experts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10419) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-133 — The Inexplicable Monks — Daniel Goleman > My guiding assumptions included the standard premise that the mind-body relationship operates according to orderly, understandable principles. One such might be called the "dose-response" rule, that the more time put into a given method of training, the greater the result in the targeted biological system. This is a basic correlate of neuroplasticity, the mechanism through which repeated experience shapes the brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Inexplicable Monks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10533) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-134 — Equality — Simon Baron-Cohen > When I was young I believed in equality as a guiding principle in life. It's not such a bad idea, when you think about it. If we treat everyone else as being our equals, no one feels inferior. And as an added bonus, no one feels superior. Whilst it is a wonderfully cosy, warm, feel-good idea, I have changed my mind about equality. There seemed to be two moments in my thinking about this principle that revealed some cracks in the perfect idea. Let me describe how these two moments changed my mind. - **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:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Equality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10257) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-135 — Software is merely a Performance Art — Kai Krause > The next level of dreaming up new frontiers with a talented tight team was complex algorithms for generating fractals, smooth color gradients, multi layer bumpmapped textures and dozens of image filters, realtime liquid image effects, and on and on... and that too, worked and this time fed over 300 people. Fifteen products sold many millions of copies - and a few of them still persist to this day, in version 9 or 10 or 11... but for me, I realized, I no longer see myself as a software designer - I changed my mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Software is merely a Performance Art](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10113) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-136 — Science writer; Author, Miss Leavitt's Stars — George Johnson > First I determined to show myself that electrons really exist. Firing up a beautiful old apparatus I found on eBay — a bulbous vacuum tube big as a melon mounted between two coils — I replayed J. J. Thomson's famous experiment of 1897 in which he measured the charge-to-mass ratio of an electron beam. It was thrilling to see the bluish-green cathode ray dive into a circle as I energized the electromagnets. Even better, when I measured the curve and plugged all the numbers into Thomson's equation, my answer was off by only a factor of two. Pretty good for a journalist. I had less success with the stubborn Millikan oil-drop experiment. Mastering it, I concluded, would be like learning to play the violin. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author; The Cancer Chronicles, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments; Columnist, The New York Times - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Science writer; Author, Miss Leavitt's Stars](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10189) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-137 — The Irrelevance of — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > Let us apply the point to the current debate on carbon emissions and climate change. Correspondents keep asking me if it the climate worriers are basing their claims on shoddy science, and whether, owing to nonlinearities, their forecasts are marred with such a possible error that we should ignore them. Now, even if I agreed that it were shoddy science; even if I agreed with the statement that the climate folks were most probably wrong, I would still opt for the most ecologically conservative stance — leave planet earth the way we found it. Consider the consequences of the very remote possibility that they may be right, or, worse, the even more remote possibility that they may be extremely right. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Irrelevance of](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10059) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-138 — Religion and Science — Clay Shirky > The Doctrine of Joint Belief isn't evidence of harmony between two systems of thought. It simply offers permission to ignore the clash between them. Skeptics aren't convinced by the doctrine, unsurprisingly, because it offers no testable proposition. What issurprising is that its supposed adherents don't believe it either. If joint beliefs were compatible beliefs, there could be no such thing as heresy. Christianity would be compatible not just with science, but with astrology (roughly as many Americans believe in astrology as evolution), with racism (because of the number of churches who use the "Curse of Ham" to justify racial segregation), and on through the list of every pair of beliefs held by practicing Christians. - **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:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Religion and Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10119) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-139 — The Light Side of Locality — Stephon H. Alexander > Before I entered the intellectual funnel of graduate school, I used to cook up thought experiments to explain coincidences, such as running into a person immediately after a random thought of them. This secretive thinking was good mental entertainment, but the demand of forging a serious career in physics research forced me to make peace with such wild speculations. In my theory of coincidences, non-local interactions as well as a dark form of energy was necessary; absolute science fiction! Fifteen years later, we now have overwhelming evidence of a 'fifth-force' mediating an invisible substance that the community has dubbed 'dark energy'. In hindsight, it is of no coincidence that I have changed my mind that nature is non-local. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics at Brown University; Author, The Jazz of Physics - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Light Side of Locality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10196) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-140 — Try the Experiment Yourself — W. Daniel Hillis > I was impressed as always by Aristotle's clarity, confidence and specificity. Of course, I do not expect you to be convinced that it is true simply because Aristotle said so, especially since his explanation is that "warm and cold react upon one another by recoil." (Aristotle, like us, was very good making up explanations to justify his beliefs). Instead, I hope that you will have the pleasure of being convinced, as I was, by trying the experiment yourself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Try the Experiment Yourself](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10063) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-141 — The Self-Made Species — Denis Dutton > The appeal of Darwin's theory of evolution — and the horror of it, for some theists — is that it expunges from biology the concept of purpose, of teleology, thereby converting biology into a mechanistic, canonical science. In this respect, the author of The Origin of Species may be said to be the combined Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler of biology. Just as these astronomers gave us a view of the heavens in which no angels were required to propel the planets in their orbs and the earth was no longer the center of the celestial system, so Darwin showed that no God was needed to design the spider's intricate web and that man is in truth but another animal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily; Author, The Art Instinct - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Self-Made Species](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10125) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-142 — Reasoning from Evidence: A Call for Education — Beatrice Golomb > I was not among those advising patients that HRT had the benefits alleged. Women who took HRT (indeed any preventive medication) differed from those who did not. These differences include characteristics that might be expected to produce the appearance of a protective association, through "confounding." For instance, people who get preventive health measures have better education and higher income — which predict less dementia and better health, irrespective of any actual effect of the treatment. (Efforts to adjust for such factors can never be trusted to capture differences sufficiently.) These disparities made it impossible to infer from such "observational" data alone whether the "true" causal relationship of hormone replacement to brain function and heart events was favorable, neutral, or adverse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Medicine at UCSD - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Reasoning from Evidence: A Call for Education](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10203) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-143 — The nation state is too big for the local things, too small for the international things and the root of most of the world's ills — David Goodhart > Moreover if the nation state can be a destructive force it is also at the root of what many liberals hold dear: representative democracy, accountability, the welfare state, redistribution of wealth and the very idea of equal citizenship. None of these things have worked to any significant extent beyond the confines of the nation state, which is not to say that they couldn't at some point in the future (indeed they already do so to a small extent in the EU). If you look around at the daily news — contested elections in Kenya, death in Pakistan — most of the bad news these days comes from too little nation state not too much. And why was rapid economic development possible in the Asian tigers but not in Africa? Surely the existence of well functioning nation states and a strong sense of national solidarity in the tigers had something to do with it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and Editor of Prospect magazine - **Extract length:** 153 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The nation state is too big for the local things, too small for the international things and the root of most of the world's ills](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10068) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-144 — Education as Stretching the Mind — Jamshed Bharucha > By 'framework' I mean any one of a range of conceptual or belief systems — either explicitly articulated or implicitly followed. These include narratives, paradigms, theories, models, schemas, frames, scripts, stereotypes, and categories; they include philosophies of life, ideologies, moral systems, ethical codes, worldviews, and political, religious or cultural affiliations. These are all systems that organize human cognition and behavior by parsing, integrating, simplifying or packaging knowledge or belief. They tend to be built on loose configurations of seemingly core features, patterns, beliefs, commitments, preferences or attitudes that have a foundational and unifying quality in one's mind or in the collective behavior of a community. When they involve the perception of people (including oneself), they foster a sense of affiliation that may trump essential features or beliefs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; President Emeritus, Cooper Union - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Education as Stretching the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10131) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-145 — Oversight and Programmer productivity — Chris DiBona > Over the summer of the average student produced 4,000 lines of code with some students producing as much at 10, 14 and even 20 thousand lines. This is an insane amount of code written weather you measure by time or by money. By some measures this means the students are anywhere between 5 and 40 times as productive as your 'average' employed programmer. This code, mind you, was written by a student who is almost always geographically separated from their mentor by at least 3 time zones and almost never has a face to face meeting with their mentor. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Open Source and Public Sector, Google - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Oversight and Programmer productivity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10210) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-146 — Consulting the public about science isn't always a waste of time — but consulting bioethicists often is — Mark Henderson > A vocal minority with strong opinions that are already widely known and impervious to argument — think Greenpeace and the embryo-rights lobby — get their responses in early and often. The much larger proportion of people who consider themselves neutral, open to persuasion, uninformed or uninterested rarely bother to take part. Public opinion is then deemed to have spoken, without reflecting true public opinion at all. Wouldn't it be better, I thought, to let scientists get on with their research, subject to occasional oversight by specialist panels with appropriate ethical expertise? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Communications, Wellcome Trust; Author, The Greek Manifesto - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Consulting the public about science isn't always a waste of time — but consulting bioethicists often is](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10074) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-147 — Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world? — Lera Boroditsky > Of course, showing that language plays a role in memory is different than showing that it plays a role in perception. Things often get confused in memory and it's not surprising that people may rely on information available in language as a second resort. But it doesn't mean that speakers of different languages actually see the colors differently as they are looking at them. I thought that if you made a task where people could see all the colors as they were making their decisions, then there wouldn't be any cross-linguistic differences. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, UCSD - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10138) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-148 — Electronic Mail — Jordan Pollack > I've changed my mind about electronic mail. When I first used email in graduate school in 1980, it was a dream. It was the most marvelous and practical invention of computer science. A text message quickly typed and reliably delivered (or be told of an error) allowed a new kind of asynchronous communication. It was cheaper (free), faster, and much more efficient than mail, phone, or fax, with a roundtrip in minutes. Only your colleagues had your address, but you could find people at other places using "finger". Colleagues started sharing text-formatted data tables, where 50K bytes was a big email message! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Electronic Mail](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10215) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-149 — SETI — Ray Kurzweil > The price-performance of computation went from 10-5 to 108 cps per thousand dollars in the 20th century. We also went from about a million dollars to a trillion dollars in the amount of capital devoted to computation, so overall progress in nonbiological intelligence went from 10-2 to 1017 cps in the 20th century, which is still short of the human biological figure of 1026 cps. By my calculations, however, we will achieve around 1069 cps by the end of the 21st century, thereby greatly multiplying the intellectual capability of our human-machine civilization. Even if we find communication methods superior to electromagnetic transmissions we will nonetheless be generating an enormous number of intelligent electromagnetic signals. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal Developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [SETI](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10079) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-150 — Evolving the laws of physics — Gregory Benford > Perhaps we need more ideas to derive a Law of Laws. Can we use the ideas of evolution? Perhaps invoke selection among laws that penalize those laws that lead to singularities — and thus taking those regions of space-time out of the game? Lee Smolin tried a limited form of this by supposing universes reproduce through black hole collapses. Ingenious, but that didn't seem to lead very far. He imagined some variation in reproduction of budded-off generations of universes, so their fundamental parameters varied a bit. Then selection could work. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Evolving the laws of physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10145) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-151 — Imagination is Real — Alison Gopnik > Recently, I've had to change my mind about the very nature of knowledge because of an obvious, but extremely weird fact about children - they pretend all the time. Walk into any preschool and you'll be surrounded by small princesses and superheroes in overalls - three-year-olds literally spend more waking hours in imaginary worlds than in the real one. Why? Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans - especially vivid for an English professor's daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Imagination is Real](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10222) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-152 — On Pattern Formation — Lewis Wolpert > We now think that the model is wrong as diffusion of a molecule is far too unreliable for reliably and accurately specifying positional values. The reasons why we think diffusion cannot work is that there is now good evidence that a diffusing molecule has to go between and even into cells, and interact with extracellular molecules making it totally unreliable. A more attractive model might be based on interactions at cell contacts as in the polarity models proposed by others. Position would be specified by cells talking to each other. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [On Pattern Formation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10084) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-153 — A flip-flop should be no handicap — Richard Dawkins > Verbal arguments of this kind can take us only so far. Mathematical models are needed, and various people supplied them, notably John Maynard Smith who concluded that Zahavi's idea, though interesting, just wouldn't work. Or, to be more precise, Maynard Smith couldn't find a mathematical model that led to the conclusion that Zahavi's theory might work. He left open the possibility that somebody else might come along later with a better model. That is exactly what Alan Grafen did, and now we all have to change our minds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A flip-flop should be no handicap](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10154) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-154 — The best forecasters will be computers — Paul Saffo > I was mistaken. I now believe that in the not too distant future, the best forecasters will not be people, but machines: ever more capable "prediction engines" probing ever deeper into stochastic spaces. Indicators of this trend are everywhere from the rise of quantitative analysis in the financial sector, to the emergence of computer-based horizon scanning systems in use by governments around the world, and of course the relentless advance of computer systems along the upward-sweeping curve of Moore's Law. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The best forecasters will be computers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10229) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-155 — Users Are Not Reactionary After All — David Gelernter > What I've changed my mind about is that the public is wedded to obsolete 1970s GUIs & info mgmt forever — PARC's desktop & Bell Labs' Unix file system. I'll give two example from my own experience. Both constitute long term ideas of mine and might seem like self-promotion, but my point is that as a society we don't have the patience to develop fully those big ideas that need time to soak in. - **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:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Users Are Not Reactionary After All](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10089) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-156 — Changing My Religion — Roger Bingham > Although this is not the place to detail the arguments, we suggested that the selective pressures of navigating ancestral environments — particularly the social world — would have required an adaptively flexible, on-line information-processing system and would have driven the evolution of the neocortex. We claimed that the ultimate function of the mind is to devise behavior that wards off the depredations of entropy and keeps our energy bank balance in the black. So our universal evolutionary heritage is not a bundle of instincts, but a self-adapting system that is responsive to environmental stimuli, constantly analyzing bioenergetic costs and benefits, creating a customized database of experiences and outcomes, and generating minds that are unique by design. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cofounder and Director, The Science Network; Neuroscience Researcher, Center for Brain and Cognition, UCSD; Coauthor, The Origin of Minds; Creator PBS Science Programs - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Changing My Religion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10161) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-157 — Physicist, MIT; Author, FAB — Neil Gershenfeld > Conversely, it makes less and less sense to define physical theories by the information technology of the last millenium (a pencil and piece of paper); a computational model is every bit as fundamental as one written with calculus. This is seen in frontiers of research in nonlinear dynamics, and quantum field theories, and black hole thermodynamics, that look more and more like massively parallel programming models. However, the organization of research has not yet caught up with this content; many of the pioneers doing the work are in neither Physics nor Computer Science departments, but are scattered around (and off) campus. Rather than trying to distinguish between programming nature and the nature of programming, I think that it makes more sense to recognize not just a technology or theory of information, but a single science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Physicist, MIT; Author, FAB](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10236) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-158 — THE SAMPLE MEAN — Bart Kosko > I have changed my mind about using the sample mean as the best way to combine measurements into a single predictive value. Sometimes it is the best way to combine data but in general you do not know that in advance. So it is not the one number from or about a data set that I would want to know in the face of total uncertainty if my life depended on the predicted outcome. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE SAMPLE MEAN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10095) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-159 — I Have No Destiny (and Neither Do You) — Jesse Bering > Seeing signs in natural events is a developmental accomplishment rather than the result of a gap in scientific knowledge. To experience an illusion, the psychological infrastructure must first be in place. Whenever I hear mayors blaming hurricanes on drug use or evangelicals attributing tsunamis to homosexuality, I think of Princess Alice. Still, after receiving bad news my first impulse is to ask myself "why?" Even for someone like me, scientific explanations just don't scratch the itch like supernatural ones. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Associate Professor, Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand; Author, Perv - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I Have No Destiny (and Neither Do You)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10168) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-160 — The importance of doing something now about the environment. — J. Craig Venter > Our planet is in crisis, and we need to mobilize all of our intellectual forces to save it. One solution could lie in building a scientifically literate society in order to survive. There are those who like to believe that the future of life on Earth will continue as it has in the past, but unfortunately for humanity, the natural world around us does not care what we believe. But believing that we can do something to change our situation using our knowledge can very much affect the environment in which we live. - **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:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The importance of doing something now about the environment.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10243) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-161 — Truth does not reside with smart university experts — Randolph Nesse > I used to believe that you could find out what is true by finding the smartest people and finding out what they think. However, the most brilliant people keep turning out to be wrong. Linus Pauling's ideas about Vitamin C are fresh in mind, but the famous physicist Lord Kelvin did more harm in 1900 with calculations based on the rate of earth's cooling that seemed to show that there had not been enough time for evolution to take place. A lot of the belief that smart people are right is an illusion caused by smart people being very convincing… even when they are wrong. - **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:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Truth does not reside with smart university experts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10101) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-162 — The Experience of the Normally Functioning Mind is the Exception — Barry C. Smith > Yet, despite the interest of these findings, I had little faith that the profusion of fMRI studies of different cortical regions would tell us much about the problems that had pre-occupied philosophers for centuries. After all, some of the greatest minds of history had long pondered the nature of consciousness, the self, the relation between self and others, only to produce a greater realisation of how hard it was to say something illuminating about any of these phenomena. The more one is immersed in neural mechanisms the less one seems to be talking about consciousness, and the more attends to the qualities of conscious experience the less easy it is to connect with the mechanism of the brain. In despair, some philosophers suggested that we must reduce or eliminate the everyday way of speaking about our mental lives to arrive at a science of mind. There appeared to be a growing gulf between how things appeared to us and how reductionist neuroscience told us they were. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor & Director, Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London - **Extract length:** 166 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Experience of the Normally Functioning Mind is the Exception](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10175) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-163 — I Missed the Complexity Revolution — David Sloan Wilson > I didn't get it. To me, Gilpin's model required a house-of-cards of assumptions, a common criticism leveled against earlier models of group selection. I therefore wrote a tepid review of Gilpin's book. I was probably also influenced by a touch of professional jealousy, as someone who myself was trying to acquire a reputation for reviving group selection! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** SUNY distinguished professor of biology and anthropology, Binghamton University; Editor-in-Chief of Evolution: This View of Life - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I Missed the Complexity Revolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10250) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-164 — The Calculus of Small but Consistent Effects — Linda S. Gottfredson > The most difficult ideas to change are those which seem so obviously true that we can scarcely imagine otherwise until confronted with unambiguous disconfirmation. For example, even behavior geneticists had long presumed that non-genetic influences on intelligence and other human traits grow with age while genetic ones weaken. Evidence reveals the opposite for intelligence and perhaps other human traits as well: heritabilities actually increase with age. My attempt to explain the evolution of high human intelligence has also led me to question another such "obvious truth," namely, that human evolution ceased when man took control of his environment. I now suspect that precisely the opposite occurred. Here is why. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Calculus of Small but Consistent Effects](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10107) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-165 — Asking for directions — Geoffrey Miller > My suggestion is that whenever we try to understand human nature in some domain, we should identify several groups of people who are likely to know a lot about that domain already, from personal, practical, or professional experience. We should seek out the most intelligent, articulate, and experienced locals — the veteran workers, managers, and trainers. Then, we should talk with them, face-to-face, expert-to-expert, as collaborating peers, not as researchers 'running subjects' or 'interviewing informants'. We may not be able to reimburse them at their professional hourly wage, but we can offer other forms of prestige, such as co-authorship on research papers. - **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:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Asking for directions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10182) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2008-166 — The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill — Daniel Kahneman > Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time. Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but more time doing tedious chores. Conditions that make people satisfied with their life do not necessarily make them happy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Recipient, Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002; Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton; Author, Thinking, Fast and Slow and Co-Author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted