# Edge 2010 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?*. 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:** [HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think) - **Archive year:** 2010 - **Response rows represented:** 126 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 126 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 4 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 4 - **Not yet promoted:** 122 ## 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 ### EDGE2010-001 — There Is No New Self — Nicholas A. Christakis > Efforts to change the way we think—and to enhance our cognitive capacity—are ancient. Brain enhancers come in several varieties. They can be either hardware or software, and they can be either internal or external to our bodies. External hardware includes things like cave paintings, written documents, eyeglasses, wristwatches, wearable computers, or brain-controlled machines. Internal hardware includes things like mind-altering substances, cochlear implants, or intra-cranial electrical stimulation. Internal software includes things like education, meditation, mnemonics, and cognitive therapy. And external software includes things like calendars, voting systems, search engines, and the Internet. - **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:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [There Is No New Self](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27409) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Human Enhancement Has Always Included External Tools by Nicholas A. Christakis|Human Enhancement Has Always Included External Tools by Nicholas A. Christakis]] ### EDGE2010-002 — The Internet And Slowness — Noga Arikha > I still remember typing essays on a much loved typewriter in my first year of university. Then the first computer, the first email account, the slow yet fluid entry into a new digital world that felt strangely natural. The advent of the Internet age happened progressively, we saw it develop like a child born of many brains, a protean animal whose characteristics were at once predictable and unknown. As soon as the digital sphere and became a worldwide reality recognizable as a new era, predictions and analyses about it grew. Edge itself was born as the creature was still growing new limbs. The tools for research and communication about this research developed along with new thinking about mind-machine interaction, about the future of education, about the impact of the Internet on texts and writing, about the issues of filtering, relevance, learning and memory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Fellow, Warburg Insitute (London); Research Associate, Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris); Author, The Ceiling Outside - **Extract length:** 143 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Internet And Slowness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26799) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-003 — 1000 Hours a Year — Simon Baron-Cohen > Bite-size emails also carry another cost: We all know there's no substitution for thinking hard and deep about a problem and how to solve it, or for getting to grips with a new area, and such tasks demand long periods of concentrated attention. Persistent, frequent email messages threaten our capacity for the real work. Becoming aware of what email is doing to our allocation of time is the first step to re-gaining control. Like other potential addictions we should perhaps attempt to counter the email habit by restricting it to certain times of the day, or by creating email-free zones by turning off Wi-Fi. This year's Edge question at least gives me pause to think whether I really want to be spending 1000 hours a year on email, at the expense of more valuable activities. - **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:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [1000 Hours a Year](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25359) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-004 — NET GAIN — Richard Dawkins > I am reminded of an insight that comes from Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novel, The Black Cloud. The cloud is a superhuman interstellar traveller, whose ‘nervous system’ consists of units that communicate with each other by radio – orders of magnitude faster than our puttering nerve impulses. But in what sense is the cloud to be seen as a single individual rather than a society? The answer is that interconnectedness that is sufficiently fast blurs the distinction. A human society would effectively become one individual if we could read each other’s thoughts through direct, high speed, brain-to-brain radio transmission. Something like that may eventually meld the various units that constitute the Internet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [NET GAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26914) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-005 — THE INCREASED NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHOSE THOUGHTS ARE IN MY HEAD — Eva Wisten > We can go original, either in creation or curation, and, if good, carve a new, little path in the anthill — or we can copy one of all the things out there and bring it home to our local group. Some ants manage to be original enough to benefit the whole anthill. But other ants can copy and modify the good stuff and bring it home. And in this marching back and forth, trying to get things done, communicate, make sense of things, I see myself not looking to leaders, but to curators who can efficiently signal where to find the good stuff. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [THE INCREASED NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHOSE THOUGHTS ARE IN MY HEAD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11923) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-006 — THE AGE OF (QUANTUM) INFORMATION? — Anton Zeilinger > What does this all have to do with the Internet? Today, we are busy developing quantum communication over large distances. Using quantum communication links, one will connect future quantum computers which work in a completely new complexity class compared to existing computers. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that humanity develops a technology which has no parallel at all in the known Universe. There are no quantum computers out there, assuming that the functioning of the brain can, in the end, be explained by non-quantum processes. - **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:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [THE AGE OF (QUANTUM) INFORMATION?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11938) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-007 — THE AGE OF (QUANTUM) INFORMATION? — Anton Zeilinger > What does this all have to do with the Internet? Today, we are busy developing quantum communication over large distances. Using quantum communication links, one will connect future quantum computers which work in a completely new complexity class compared to existing computers. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that humanity develops a technology which has no parallel at all in the known Universe. There are no quantum computers out there, assuming that the functioning of the brain can, in the end, be explained by non-quantum processes. - **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:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [THE AGE OF (QUANTUM) INFORMATION?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11954) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-008 — THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUS — Unattributed Edge contributor > Inherent in these ideas is a radical new epistemology. It tears apart the fabric of our habitual thinking. Subject and object fuse. The individual self decreates. I wrote a synthesis of these ideas in my first book, By the Late John Brockman (1969), taking information theory — the mathematical theory of communications — as a model for regarding all human experience. I began to develop a theme that has informed my endeavors ever since: New technologies beget new perceptions. Reality is a man-made process. Our images of our world and of ourselves are, in part, models resulting from our perceptions of the technologies we generate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11958) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-009 — IT'S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW, IT'S WHAT YOU CAN FIND OUT — Marissa Mayer > The Web has also enabled amazing dynamic visualizations, where an ideal presentation of information is constructed — a table of comparisons or a data-enhanced map, for example. These visualizations — be it news from around the world displayed on a globe or a sortable table of airfares — can greatly enhance our understanding of the world or our sense of opportunity. We can understand in an instant what would have taken months to create just a few short years ago. Yet, the Internet's lack of structure means that it is not possible to construct these types of visualizations over any or all data. To achieve true automated, general understanding and visualization, we will need much better machine learning, entity extraction, and semantics capable of operating at vast scale. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Yahoo - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [IT'S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW, IT'S WHAT YOU CAN FIND OUT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11973) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-010 — THE DEGRADATION OF PREDICTABILITY — AND KNOWLEDGE — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > Look at this current economic crisis that started in 2008: there are about a million persons on the planet who identify themselves in the field of economics. Yet just a handful realized the possibility and depth of what could have taken place and protected themselves from the consequences. At no time in the history of mankind have we lived under so much ignorance (easily measured in terms of forecast errors) coupled with so much intellectual hubris. At no point have we had central bankers missing elementary risk metrics, like debt levels, that even the Babylonians understood well. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE DEGRADATION OF PREDICTABILITY — AND KNOWLEDGE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11742) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-011 — THE INTERNET HAS NOT CHANGED THE WAY THAT I THINK — Ian Wilmut > Use of the Internet has not changed the way that I think, but it is making a unique contribution by providing me with immediate and convenient access to an extraordinary range of ideas and information. This development can be considered as a natural extension to the sequence that began with tablets of clay, continued through papyrus, parchment, handwritten manuscripts on paper to the recent mass produced books printed on paper. Happily the Internet provides us with access to many of these earlier forms of the written word as well as to electronic communications. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Reproductive Biology, Director Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Author, After Dolly - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET HAS NOT CHANGED THE WAY THAT I THINK](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11908) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-012 — LEVELLING THE INTELLECTUAL PLAYING FIELD — Michael Shermer > Who needs brick and mortar libraries when knowledge is available at fingertips' notice? Who needs acceptance into elite universities when the same knowledge is searchable by anyone from anywhere? Who needs access to exclusive clubs when knowledge is no longer the province of just the privileged? We're not all the way there yet, but the Internet is leveling the knowledge playing field by democratizing access to information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [LEVELLING THE INTELLECTUAL PLAYING FIELD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11594) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-013 — THE INTERNET IS NOT CHANGING THE WAY I THINK, BUT IT HAS CHANGED WHAT I THINK — Timothy Taylor > The first bit is wholly unsurprising: the Internet was designed for people like me, by people like me, most of them English speakers. Fundamentally reflecting western, rationalist, objective, data-organizing drives, the Internet simply enhances my ability to think in familiar ways, letting me work longer, more often, with better focus, free from the social tyranny of the library and the uncertainty of postmen. The Internet has changed what I think, however — most notably about where the human race is now headed. From a prehistorian's perspective, I judge that we have been returned to a point last occupied at the time of our evolutionary origin. This is what I mean: - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET IS NOT CHANGING THE WAY I THINK, BUT IT HAS CHANGED WHAT I THINK](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11757) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-014 — THE SHOCK OF INCLUSION — Clay Shirky > As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research. And so on. - **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:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE SHOCK OF INCLUSION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11609) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-015 — BENEFACTION & DISTRACTION — Max Tegmark > On the other hand, the ubiquity of information is clearly having positive impact in areas ranging from science and education to economic development. I think the essence of science is to think for oneself and question authority. I therefore delight in the fact that the Internet makes it harder to restrict information and block the truth. Once the cat is out of the bag and in the cloud, that's it. Today it's hard even for Iran and China to prevent information dissemination. Soviet-style restrictions on copying machines sound quaint today, and the only currently reliable censorship is not to allow the Internet at all, like in North Korea. - **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:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [BENEFACTION & DISTRACTION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11772) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-016 — THINKING MORE ABOUT LESS OR LESS ABOUT MORE? — Barry C. Smith > What of the new Web-dependent phenomena: open access and open source programming, virtual social networking, the co-construction of knowledge? All these are gains and reflect something hopeful: the collaborative effort of our joint endeavour; our willingness to share. The inclusive natures of these phenomena are encouraging. I want to join in and like the idea of making a modest contribution to a larger enterprise. But the new technologies let me witness their distancing and distorting influences: Internet fuelled fantasies where everyone can be a celebrity, or can live through their avatar in virtual reality, or develop alternative personalities in chat rooms — fantasies that someone, somewhere on the Internet is making money from. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor & Director, Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THINKING MORE ABOUT LESS OR LESS ABOUT MORE?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11623) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-017 — WILL THE GREAT LEVELER DESTROY DIVERSITYOF THOUGHT? — Frank Tipler > The Internet first appeared long after I had received my Ph.D. in physics, and I was slow to use it. I had been trained in physical library search techniques: look up the subject in Science Abstracts (a journal itself now made defunct by the Internet), then go to the archived full article in the physical journal shelved nearby. Now I simply search the topics in the Science Citation Index (SCI), and then go to the journal article available online. I no longer have to go to the library; I can access the SCI and the online journals via the Internet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [WILL THE GREAT LEVELER DESTROY DIVERSITYOF THOUGHT?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11787) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-018 — INFORMED, TIGHTFISTED, AND SYNTHETIC — Laurence C. Smith > How has my thinking changed since that day in 1993? Like most everyone I've become both more addicted to information, and more informed. With so much knowledge poised instantly beneath my fingertips, I am far less tolerant of my own ignorance. If I don't know something, I look it up. Today I flit through dozens of newspapers a day when before I barely read one. Too many hours of my life are consumed in this way, and other tasks procrastinated, but I am perpetually educated in return. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [INFORMED, TIGHTFISTED, AND SYNTHETIC](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11638) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-019 — CUT AND PASTE — Fred Tomaselli > I'm an information grazer. I've always felt comfortable with skidding across vast plains of data, connecting the dots wherever it feels right. The Internet mirrors the cross connectivity of my own mind — a mind, it should be noted, that has been hybridized by drugs and other consciousness altering activities. Aldous Huxley famously posited that to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminates unessential information from the totality of our minds. Psychedelics, on the other hand, overwhelm our minds with the fullness of the world. In other words, information overload is just another way of being psychedelic. I can live with this. All good art experiences are inherently psychoactive. Art modifies perception and offers either a window or a mirror. Sometimes, if we're lucky, it does it all at the same time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [CUT AND PASTE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11803) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-020 — WE HAVE BECOME HUNTER GATHERERS OF IMAGES AND INFORMATION — Lee Smolin > The Internet is also itself a metaphor for the emerging paradigm of thought in which systems are conceived as networks of relationships. To the extent that a Web page can be defined only by what links to it and what it links to, it is analogous to one of Leibniz's monads. But Web pages still have content, and so are not purely relational. Imagine a virtual world abstracted from the Internet by deleting all the content so that all that remained was the links. This is an image of the universe according to relational theories of space and time, it is also an image of the neural network in the brain. The content corresponds to what is missing in those model, it corresponds to what physicists and computer scientists have yet to understand about the difference between a mathematical model and an animated world or conscious mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 147 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [WE HAVE BECOME HUNTER GATHERERS OF IMAGES AND INFORMATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11653) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-021 — I SEEM TO BE METADATA — John Tooby > Printing summoned into existence increasingly diversified bodies of new knowledge, multiplied productive divisions of labor, midwifed new professions, and greatly expanded the middle class. It threw up voluntary, meritocratic new hierarchies of knowledge and productivity to rival traditional hierarchies of force and superstition. In short, the release of printing technology into human societies brought into being a vast new ecosystem of knowledge — dense, diverse, rapidly changing, rapidly growing, and beyond the ability of any one mind to encompass, or any government to control. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [I SEEM TO BE METADATA](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11818) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-022 — OF KNOWLEDGE, CONTENT, PLACE AND SPACE — Galia Solomonoff > The Internet is producing a fundamental alteration in the relationship between knowledge, content, place and space. If we consider the world as divided into two similarly populous halves: the ones born before 1980 and the ones born after 1980 — of course there are other important differences such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, geography, etc., yet I see the 1980 as significant in the shift and alteration in the relationship of knowledge, place and space, due to the use of the Internet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Architect; Solomonoff Architecture Studio - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [OF KNOWLEDGE, CONTENT, PLACE AND SPACE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11667) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-023 — EXPOSING THE LANDSCAPES OF DEEP SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS — Arnold Trehub > As I write this, a group of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers located at far-flung corners of the world have been meeting online in a workshop devoted to solving what is arguably the fundamental problem in science — the mystery of human consciousness. The Internet has given me and the other participants in this effort the opportunity to ask each other probing questions, to engage in civil argument, specify areas of agreement, clarify points of disagreement, and to suggest what we should do next to advance our scientific understanding of consciousness. All of this discussion is taking place in near real-time, and all of our comments are preserved and archived for publication. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [EXPOSING THE LANDSCAPES OF DEEP SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11832) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-024 — NAVIGATING PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL LIVES — Linda Stone > How has the Internet changed my thinking? The more I've loved and known it, the clearer the contrast, the more intense the tension between a physical life and a virtual life. The Internet stole my body, now a lifeless form hunched in front of a glowing screen. My senses dulled as my greedy mind became one with the global brain we call the Internet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hi-Tech Industry Consultant; Former Executive at Apple Computer and Microsoft Corporation - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [NAVIGATING PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL LIVES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11683) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-025 — THE INTERNET DISCONNECT — Sherry Turkle > You stare at a screen in your home or in your hand. You own it; it is passive and glows — all things that seem to promise safety and a bounded space. But the feeling of sending an e-mail or text or instant message is at odds with its reality. You feel in a zone that is private and ephemeral. But the Internet is public and forever. This is the disconnect of Internet communication. It begins to explain why people, sophisticated people, continue to send damaging e-mails and text messages that document them breaking the law and betraying their families. These make the headlines. Other consequences of the disconnect show up in the inner life of the generation that has grown up with always-on/always-on-you connectivity. The disconnect shapes their psychological and political sensibility. - **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:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET DISCONNECT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11847) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-026 — BY CHANGING MY BEHAVIOUR, OVER AND OVER AGAIN — Seirian Sumner > Initial impressions of an Internet-free life from my Facebook friends were of general horror. The Internet plays a crucial role in our personal lives: my friends said they would be 'lost', 'stressed', 'anxious' and 'isolated' without it. They were concerned about 'No 24-7 chats?'; 'How would I make new friends/meet new people?'; 'How would I keep in touch with my friends abroad?'; 'I'd actually have to buy things in person from real people!'. We depend on the Internet as our social network, to connect with friends, strangers and to access resources. Sitting at my computer, I am one of the millions of 'nodes' making up the network. Whilst physical interactions with other nodes in the network is largely impossible, I am potentially connected to them all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Reader, Behavioral Ecology, University College London - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [BY CHANGING MY BEHAVIOUR, OVER AND OVER AGAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11698) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-027 — "GO VIRTUAL YOUNG MAN" — Eric R. Weinstein > Following this line of thinking, it is possible that a generalized Internet may even be definable with sufficient care as a kind of failure of the physical world to close as a self-contained system. Were a modern Rip van Winkle sufficiently clever, he might eventually infer something like the existence of file sharing networks from witnessing the collapse of music stores, CD sales, and the recording industry's revenue model. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** ["GO VIRTUAL YOUNG MAN"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11861) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-028 — IT HAS SHARPENED MY MEMORY — Tom Standage > As Giordano of Pisa noted in 1306, "It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles that help one see well, an art that is one of the best and most necessary in the world." Eyeglasses doubled the useful working life of scribes and skilled craftsmen who were otherwise liable to suffer from farsightedness (presbyopia) from the age of around 40. The historian David Landes has suggested that this use of technology overcame what had previously been regarded as an unavoidable human limitation then spurred further innovations of a similar nature, such as the development of fine optical instruments and precision machine tools. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Business Affairs Editor, The Economist; Author, The Edible History of the Humanity - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [IT HAS SHARPENED MY MEMORY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11713) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-029 — I ONLY THINK ON THE INTERNET — Ai Weiwei > I only think on the Internet anymore. My thinking is now divided into on the net and off the net. If I'm not on the net, I don't think that much; when I'm on the net, I start to think. In this way, my thinking becomes always part of something else. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Curator; Architectural Designer (The Bird's Nest); Cultural And Social Commentator; Activist - **Extract length:** 51 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [I ONLY THINK ON THE INTERNET](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11877) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-030 — THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON INTERNET — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Gaining knowledge and skills should benefit survival, but not if you spend all of your time immersed in the Internet. The intermittent rewards can become addictive, hijacking your dopamine neurons that predict future rewards. The Internet, however, has not been around long enough, and is changing too rapidly, to know what the long-term effects will be on brain function. What is the ultimate price for omniscience? - **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:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON INTERNET](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11563) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-031 — COGITAMUS, ERGO SUM? THE "DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING THE NAME OF SOMETHING AND KNOWING SOMETHING" — Victoria Stodden > Data analysis has risen as an intellectual force of its own, with implications for how we accept new knowledge as facts. In 1962 John Tukey first proposed data analysis as a field in its own right and split the field of statistics in two. At that time, statistics was synonymous with mathematical analysis and the Information Age was only just beginning. Tukey foresaw the coming data deluge and that the traditional machinery of mathematical statistics, such as hypothesis testing and confidence statements, had relatively little to offer for these new problems. There was an enormous amount of analysis to be done on vast amounts of data, and insisting on mathematics ran the risk of missing important findings. Now, data analysis is presenting challenging mathematical questions and we are running that same risk in reverse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [COGITAMUS, ERGO SUM? THE "DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING THE NAME OF SOMETHING AND KNOWING SOMETHING"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11726) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-032 — LET US CALCULATE — Frank Wilczek > Fortunately, both could be at hand. The SETI@home project has enabled people around the world to donate their idle computer time to sift radio waves from space, advancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In connection with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, CERN laboratory — where, earlier, the World Wide Web was born — is pioneering the GRID computer project, a sort of Internet on steroids, that will allow many thousands of remote computers and their users to share data and allocate tasks dynamically, functioning in essence as one giant brain. Only thus can we cope — barely! — with the gush of information that collisions at the LHC will generate. Projects like these are the shape of things to come. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [LET US CALCULATE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11892) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-033 — PUBLICATIONS CAN PERISH — Robert Shapiro > The Journal of Organic Chemistry started in 1936, and continues up to the present. Its demands on library shelf space have increased over time: the first volume contained only 583 pages, while the 2009 edition had 9680. The arrival of the Internet rescued libraries from the space crisis created by the proliferation of new journals and the vast increase in the size of existing ones. Many paper subscriptions were replaced by electronic ones, and past holdings were converted to digital form. It is not hard to imagine a future time when paper copies of the scientific literature will no longer exist. Many new journals are appearing only in digital form. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Senior Research Scientist, New York University; Author, Planetary Dreams - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [PUBLICATIONS CAN PERISH](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11578) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-034 — AN IMPENETRABLE MACHINE — Emily Pronin > The idea that my own mental processes are impenetrable to me is a tough one to swallow. It's hard to accept that, at a very basic level, I don't know what's going on in my own head. At the same time, the idea has a certain obviousness to it — of course I can't recount the enormous complexity of biochemical processes and neural firing that gives rise to my thoughts. The typical neuron in my brain has 1000s of synaptic connections to other neurons. Sound familiar? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Princeton University - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [AN IMPENETRABLE MACHINE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11262) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-035 — THE INTERNET MAKES ME THINK IN THE PRESENT TENSE — Douglas Rushkoff > In some senses, this was the goal of those who developed the computers and networks on which we depend today. Technology visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and James Licklider sought to develop machines that could do our remembering for us. Computers would free us from the tyranny of the past — as well as the horrors of World War II — allowing us to forget everything and devote our minds to solving the problems of today. The information would still be there — it would simply be stored out of body, in a machine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET MAKES ME THINK IN THE PRESENT TENSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11430) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-036 — INTERNET SOCIETY — Robert Provine > The basic cellphone has morphed into a powerful, mobile, multimedia communication device and computer terminal that is a major driver of Internet society. It gives immediate, constant contact with select, distant conversants, and can tell you where you are, where you should go next, how to get there, provide diversions while waiting, and document your journey with text, snaps and video images. For some, this is enhanced reality, but it comes at the price of the here-and-now. Whatever your opinion and level of engagement, the cellphone and related Internet devices are profound social prostheses — almost brain implants — that have changed our lives and culture. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [INTERNET SOCIETY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11277) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-037 — "IF YOU HAVE CANCER, DON'T GO TO THE INTERNET" — Karl Sabbagh > Lady Antonia Fraser's remark was really a tribute to the reliability and comprehensiveness of the Internet. It wasn't so much that she came across a pessimistic forecast of Harold's prognosis, more that it was probably a reliable pessimistic forecast, based on up-to-date information. It doesn't of course mean that it was accurate. She may not have consulted all cancer sites, or it may be that no one really knows for sure what the prognosis was for oesophageal cancer. But she assumed — and I assume myself when using the Internet — that with a little skill and judgment you can get more reliable information there than anywhere else. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** ["IF YOU HAVE CANCER, DON'T GO TO THE INTERNET"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11444) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-038 — WE KNOW LESS ABOUT THINKING THAN WE THINK — Steven R. Quartz > We also know very little about how brain processes underlie thought. We do not understand the principles by which a single neuron integrates signals, nor even the 'code' it uses to encode information and to signal it to other neurons. We do not yet have the theoretical tools to understand how a billion of these cells interact to create complex thought. How such interactions create our inner mental life and give rise to the phenomenology of our experience (consciousness) remains, I think, as much of a fundamental mystery today as it did centuries ago. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Co-author, Cool - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [WE KNOW LESS ABOUT THINKING THAN WE THINK](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11292) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-039 — A THIRD KIND OF KNOWLEDGE — Paul Saffo > Make something easy to do and skills once reserved to elites will become tools of the masses. Electronic calculators were not mere slide rule substitutes; they made computation convenient and accessible to everyone. The Internet is changing our thinking by giving the tremendous power of search to the most casual of users. We have democratized knowledge-finding in the same way 18th century publishing democratized knowledge access. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A THIRD KIND OF KNOWLEDGE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11459) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-040 — NO ONE IS IMMUNE TO THE STORMS THAT SHAKE THE WORLD — Raqs Media Collective > The Internet also alters our perception of duration. Sometimes, when working on an obstinately analog process such as the actual fabrication of an object, the internalized shadow of fleeting Internet time in our consciousness makes us perceive how the inevitable delays inherent in the fashioning of things (in all their messy 'thingness') ground us into appreciating the rhythms of the real world. In this way, the Internet's pervasive co-presence with real world processes, ends up reminding us of the fact that our experience of duration is now a layered thing. We now have more than one clock, running in more than one direction, at more than one speeds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artists, Media Practitioners, Curators, Editors and Catalysts of Cultural Processes - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [NO ONE IS IMMUNE TO THE STORMS THAT SHAKE THE WORLD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11306) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-041 — THE EXTINCTION OF EXPERIENCE — Scott Sampson > As the first generation to contemplate the fact that humanity may have a severely truncated future, we live at arguably the most pivotal moment in the substantial history of Homo sapiens. Decisions made and actions taken during the next generation will have an imbalanced impact on the future of humans and all other life on Earth. If we blunder onward on our present course—increasing populations, poverty, greenhouse gas emissions, and habitat destruction—we face no less than the collapse of civilization and the decimation of the biosphere. Given the present dire circumstances, any new far-reaching cultural phenomenon must be evaluated in terms of its ability to help or hinder the pressing work to be done; certainly this concern applies to how the Internet influences thinking. - **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:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [THE EXTINCTION OF EXPERIENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11474) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-042 — ONCE I WAS LOST, BUT NOW I AM FOUND, OR HOW TO NAVIGATE IN THE CHARTROOM OF MEMORY — Neri Oxman > Between the associative nature of memory and the referential eminence of the map lies a blueprint for the brain. In the ambience of future ubiquitous technologies looms the promise of an ecstasy of connectivity (or thus is the vision of new consciousness à la Gibson and Sterling). If such a view of augmented interactivity is even remotely accurate (as it must be), it is the absence of a cognate presence that defies the achievement of transforming the Internet to a new reality, a universally accessible medium for enhanced thinking. If the Internet can potentially become an alternative medium of human consciousness, how then can a cognate presence inspire the properties of infinite memory with the experiential and the reflective, all packaged for convenience and pleasure in a Mickey Mouse like antenna cap? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Architect, Researcher, MIT; Founder, Materialecology - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [ONCE I WAS LOST, BUT NOW I AM FOUND, OR HOW TO NAVIGATE IN THE CHARTROOM OF MEMORY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11157) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-043 — "THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTES IS NOT DATA" — Lisa Randall > Someone pointed out to me once that he, like me, never uses a bookmark in a book. I always attributed my negligence to disorganization and laziness — the few times I attempted to use a bookmark I promptly misplaced it. — But what I realized after this was pointed out is that not using — bookmarks was my choice. It doesn't make sense to find a place in a book that you technically have read but that is so far from your memory that you don't remember having read it. By not using a bookmark, I was guaranteed to return to the last continuous section of text that actually made a dent in my brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** ["THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTES IS NOT DATA"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11322) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-044 — THE UN-FOCUSING, DE-LIBERATING EFFECTS OF JOINING THE HIVE MIND — Larry Sanger > The instant availability of an ocean of information has been an epoch-making boon to humanity. But has the resulting information overload also deeply changed how we think? Has it changed the nature of the self? Has it even — as some have suggested — radically altered the relationship of the individual and society? These are important philosophical questions, but vague and slippery, and I hope to clarify them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder of Wikipedia and Citizendium - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE UN-FOCUSING, DE-LIBERATING EFFECTS OF JOINING THE HIVE MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11489) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-045 — BRAIN CANDY AND BAD MATHEMATICS — Mark Pagel > The Internet isn't changing the way I or anybody else thinks. We know this because we can still visit some people on Earth who don't have the Internet and they think the same way that we do. My general purpose thinking circuits are hard wired into my brain from genetic instructions honed over millions of years of natural selection. True, the brain is plastic, it responds to the way it is brought up by its user, or to the language it has been taught to speak, but its fundamental structure is not changed this way, except perhaps in extremis, maybe eight hours per day of computer games. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, UK; Fellow, Royal Society; Author, Wired for Culture - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [BRAIN CANDY AND BAD MATHEMATICS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11172) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-046 — A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD — Martin Rees > Clustering of experts in actual institutions will continue, for the same reason that high-tech expertise congregates in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. But the actual progress of science will be driven by ever more immersive technology where propinquity is irrelevant. Traditional universities will survive insofar as they offer mentoring and personal contact to their students. But it's less clear that there will be a future for the 'mass university' where the students are offered little more than a passive role in lectures (generally of mediocre quality) with minimal feedback. Instead, the Internet will offer access to outstanding lectures — and in return will offer the star lecturers (and perhaps the best classroom teachers too) a potentially global reach. - **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:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11337) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-047 — FORGET WISDOM OF THE CROWD — Robert Sapolsky > As another plus, the Internet has made me think that the downtrodden have a slightly better chance of being heard — the efficacy of the crowd. A small example of that recent elections in which candidates have run Internet campaigns. Far more consequential, of course, is the ability of the people to vote online about who should win American Idol. But what I'm beginning to think is possible is that someday, an abused populace will rise up, and doing nothing more than sitting at their computers and hacking away, freeze a government and bring down a dictator. Forget a Velvet Revolution. An Online Revolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [FORGET WISDOM OF THE CROWD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11504) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-048 — HELL IF I KNOW — Gregory Paul > As for the specific question of how the Internet is changing my thinking, online apps facilitate the statistical analyses that are expanding my sociological interests and conclusions further than I ever thought they would go, leading to unanticipated answers to some fundamental questions about popular religion that I am delighted to uncover. Beyond that there are more subtle effects, but exactly what they are I am not sure sans the parallel world experiment. I also fear that the brevity favored by on screen versus page turning reading is shortening my attention span. It is as if one of Dawkins's memes is altering my unwilling mind like a bad science fiction story. But that's a non-quantitative, anecdotal impression; perhaps I just think my thinking has changed. It is possible the new arrangement is not altering my mental exertions further than it is because the old fashioned mind generated by my brain remains geared to the former system. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Researcher; Author, The Princeton Field Guide of Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 156 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [HELL IF I KNOW](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11187) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-049 — A MIRACLE AND A CURSE — Ed Regis > The Internet is not changing the way I think (nor, so far as I am concerned, the way anyone else thinks, either, but that is not the Edge question). To state the matter somewhat naively, I continue to think the same way I always thought: by using my brain, my five (or six) senses, and by considering the relevant available information. I mean, how else can you think? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A MIRACLE AND A CURSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11354) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-050 — THE THINKING PROCESS HASN'T CHANGED IN 50,000 YEARS — Roger Schank > Finding evidence and interpreting evidence has not, unfortunately, changed that much either. At first glance, we might think that the Internet has radically changed the way look for and accept evidence. And, I am sure this is true for the intellectuals who write Edge response essays. I am able to find evidence more quickly, to find explanations that others have offered more easily. I can think about a complex issue with more information and with the help of others who have thought about that issue before. Of course, I could always do this in a University environment, but now I can do it while sitting at home, and I can do it more quickly. This is nice, but less important than people realize. - **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:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE THINKING PROCESS HASN'T CHANGED IN 50,000 YEARS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11519) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-051 — I THINK, THEREFORE I AM — STILL ME — Irene Pepperberg > Maybe the Internet has given me more things to think about, but that doesn't fundamentally change the way I think. Rather, what has changed, and is still changing, is my relationship with the Internet — from unabashed infatuation to disillusionment to a kind of armed truce. And, no, I'm not sidestepping the question, because until the Internet actually rewires my brain, it won't change my processing abilities. Of course, such rewiring may be in the offing, and quite possibly sooner than we expect, but that's not yet the case. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [I THINK, THEREFORE I AM — STILL ME](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11201) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-052 — ATTENTION IS THE FUNDAMENTAL LITERACY — Howard Rheingold > Network awareness, from the strength of weak ties and the nature of small-world networks to the power of publics and the how and why of changing Facebook privacy settings, would be the next literacy I would teach, after crap detection. Networks aren't magic, and knowing the principles by which they operate confers power on the knowledgeable. How could people NOT use the Internet in muddled, frazzled, fractured ways when hardly anybody instructs anybody else about how to use the Net salubriously? It is inevitable that people will use the Net in ways that influence how they think and what they think. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [ATTENTION IS THE FUNDAMENTAL LITERACY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11370) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-053 — MY THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE NOT BOUND BY THE MEAT MACHINE THAT IS MY BRAIN, NOR MY LOCALITY NOR MY TIME — Peter Schwartz > The modern Internet has achieved much of what Ted Nelson articulated decades ago in his vision of the Xanadu project or Doug Englebart in his human augmentation vision at SRI. Nearly all useful knowledge is now accessible instantaneously from much of the world. Our effective personal memories are now vastly larger, essentially infinite. Our identity is embedded in what we know. And how I think is an expression of that identity. For me the Internet has led over time to that deep sense of collaboration, awareness and ubiquitous knowledge that means that my thought processes are not bound by the meat machine that is my brain, nor my locality nor my time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [MY THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE NOT BOUND BY THE MEAT MACHINE THAT IS MY BRAIN, NOR MY LOCALITY NOR MY TIME](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11534) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Digital Life/Thought Can Extend Beyond Brain Place and Time by Peter Schwartz|Thought Can Extend Beyond Brain Place and Time by Peter Schwartz]] ### EDGE2010-054 — THE RISE OF INTERNET PROSTHETIC BRAINS AND SOLITON PERSONHOOD — Clifford Pickover > With increasing frequency, people around the globe seek advice and social support from other individuals connected via the Internet. Our minds arise not only from our own brains but from Internet prosthetic brains (IPBs) — those clusters of people with whom we share information and advice through electronic networks. The simple notion of you and me is changing. For example, I rely on others to help me reason beyond the limits of my own intuition and abilities. Many of my decisions in life are shaped by my IPBs around the globe, and these decisions range from advice on software, computer problems, health issues, and emotional concerns. Thus, when asked to make a decision, who is the me who is actually making that decision? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE RISE OF INTERNET PROSTHETIC BRAINS AND SOLITON PERSONHOOD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11216) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-055 — THE COLLECTIVE BRAIN — Matt Ridley > The Internet is the ultimate mating ground for ideas, the supreme lekking arena for memes. Cultural and intellectual evolution depends on sex just as much as biological evolution does; otherwise it remains a merely vertical transmission system. Sex allows creatures to draw upon mutations that happen anywhere in their species. The Internet allows people to draw upon ideas that occur to anybody in the world. Radio and printing did this too, and so did writing, and before that language, but the Internet has made it fast and furious. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [THE COLLECTIVE BRAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11384) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-056 — I HAVE OUTSOURCED MY MEMORY — Charles Seife > The Internet turned an occasional habit into my primary way of storing knowledge. As the Web grew, my browsers began to bloat with bookmarked Websites, with sites that stored information that I deemed important but didn't feel obliged to commit to memory. And as search engines matured, I stopped bothering even with bookmarks; I soon relied upon Altavista, Hotbot, and then Google to help me find — and recall — ideas. My meta-memories, my pointers to ideas, started being replaced by meta-meta-memories, by pointers to pointers to data. Each day, my brain fills with these quasi-memories, with pointers and with pointers to pointers, each one a dusty IOU sitting where a fact or idea should reside. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [I HAVE OUTSOURCED MY MEMORY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11548) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-057 — THINKING WITH OTHERS SO CLOSE THAT YOU CAN SMELL THEIR SPIT — Stuart Pimm > The Internet has vastly more coverage of everything, immediate, future, and past. So when we want to know who has signed which oil exploration leases to which tracts of remote forest, the data are not in Duke's library (or anyone else's), but I can get them online from the Web site of local newspapers. And I can do that in the forest clearing, surrounded by those who futures have been signed away. Knowledge is now everywhere. You can find it from everywhere too. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; Author, The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THINKING WITH OTHERS SO CLOSE THAT YOU CAN SMELL THEIR SPIT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11231) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-058 — THE INTERFACE I WANT IS THE REAL WORLD — Matthew Ritchie > Is it liberating? The old, the poor and the uneducated are locked out. Everyone else is locked in. All studies show mass users locked in reversed and concentric learning patterns, seeking only the familiar, even, perhaps especially, if novelty is their version of the same old thing. As a shared space, it is a failure, celebrating only those that obey its rules. We sniff out our digital blazes, following the circular depletion of our own curiosity reservoirs. We are running out of selves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE INTERFACE I WANT IS THE REAL WORLD](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11399) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-059 — NOT AT ALL — Steven Pinker > As someone who believes both in human nature and in timeless standards of logic and evidence, I'm skeptical of the common claim that the Internet is changing the way we think. Electronic media aren't going to revamp the brain's mechanisms of information processing, nor will they supersede modus ponens or Bayes' theorem. Claims that the Internet is changing human thought are propelled by a number of forces: the pressure on pundits to announce that this or that "changes everything"; a superficial conception of what "thinking" is that conflates content with process; the neophobic mindset that "if young people do something that I don't do, the culture is declining." But I don't think the claims stand up to scrutiny. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [NOT AT ALL](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11247) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-060 — SEARCH AND EMERGENCE — Rudy Rucker > Twenty or thirty years ago, people dreamed of a global mind that knew everything and could answer any question. In those early times, we imagined that we'd need a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence to make the global mind work — we thought of it as resembling an extremely smart person. The conventional Hollywood image for the global mind's interface was a talking head on a wall-sized screen. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [SEARCH AND EMERGENCE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11415) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-061 — THE HUMAN TEXTURE OF INFORMATION — Jon Kleinberg > Finally, the Internet has changed how I think professionally, as a computer scientist. In the thirteen years since I finished graduate school, the Internet has steadily and incontrovertibly advanced the argument that computer science is not just about technology but about human beings as well — about the power of human beings to collectively create knowledge and engage in self-expression on a global scale. This has been a thrilling development, and one that points to a new phase in our understanding of what people and technology can accomplish together, and about the world we've grown to jointly inhabit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE HUMAN TEXTURE OF INFORMATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10803) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-062 — BY AFFORDING ME NEW WORLDWIDE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION ACCESS — Lynn Margulis > Probably some bacterial ancestors look back at the period 1000-600 million years ago when both water and air were full of hydrogen sulfide (poisonous to people). Before oxygen bubbled up and its combustion fueled the frenetic rate of environmental degradation that began in the Proterozoic eon and continues until today was "The Age of Bacteria", a calmer, quieter time. Aided and abetted by our very recent (Holocene) loud, careless, ignorant, frantic, clever but unwise, ephemeral human species, the rest of our planetmates have been there before us and will be there when we're gone. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [BY AFFORDING ME NEW WORLDWIDE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION ACCESS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10957) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-063 — MY FINGERS HAVE BECOME PART OF MY BRAIN — James J. O'Donnell > With the invention of writing, the eyes took on a new role. Knowledge wasn't all in memory, but was found in present, visual stimuli: the written word in one form or another. We have built a might culture based on all the things that humankind can produce and the eye can study. What we could read in the traditional library of 25 years ago was orders of magnitude richer and more diverse than the most that any person could ever see, hear, or be told of in one lifetime. The modern correlative to Thucydides would be Churchill's history of World War II and the abundance of written documents he shows himself dependent on at every stage of the war. But imagine Churchill or Hitler with Internet-like access to information! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [MY FINGERS HAVE BECOME PART OF MY BRAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11113) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-064 — HIJACKING THE FUTURE SELF — Brian Knutson > In terms of how I think, I fear that the Internet is less helpful. Although I can find information faster, that information is not always the most relevant, and is often tangential. More often than I'd like to admit, I sit down to do something and then get up bleary-eyed hours later, only to realize my task remains undone (or I can't even remember the starting point). The sensation is not unlike walking into a room, stopping, and asking "now, what was I here for?" — except that you've just wandered through a mansion and can't even remember what the entrance looked like. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [HIJACKING THE FUTURE SELF](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10817) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-065 — WHO SAID IT WAS GOING TO GET BETTER? — John Markoff > Not only have I been transformed into an Internet pessimist, but recently the Net has begun to feel downright spooky. Not to be anthropomorphic but doesn't the Net seem to have a mind of its own? We've moved deeply into a world where it is leaching value from virtually every traditional institution in the name of some borg-like future. Will we all be assimilated, or have we been already? Wait! Stop me! That was The Matrix wasn't it? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Pulitzer Prize-winning Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Whole Earth - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [WHO SAID IT WAS GOING TO GET BETTER?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10971) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-066 — PATTERN RECOGNITION — Tim O'Reilly > Many years ago, I began my career in technology as a technical writer, landing my first job writing a computer manual on the same day that I saw my first computer. The one skill I had to rely on was one I had honed in my years as a reader, and in my university training in Greek and Latin classics: the ability to follow the breadcrumb trail of words back to their meaning. - **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:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [PATTERN RECOGNITION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11127) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-067 — a completely new form of sense — Terence Koh > as a human, i have experienced reality; as have the rest of my species since we had the ability to self-realize, as a combination of what we see, smell, feel, hear, and taste. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 33 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [a completely new form of sense](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10831) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-068 — THE INTERNET REIFIES A LOGIC THAT WAS ALWAYS ALREADY THERE — Tom McCarthy > Western culture has always been about networks: look at Clytemnestra's 'beacon telegraph' speech in the Oresteia, or the relay-system of oracles and crytpic signals Oedipus has to navigate. Look at Schreber's vision of wires and nerves, or Kafka and Rilke's visions of giant switchboards linking mortals to (and simultaneously denying them access to the source-code of) gods and angels. Or the writings of Heidegger, or Derrida: meshes, relays, endless transmission. The Internet reifies a logic that was always already there. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist & Writer; Author: Remainder, Men in Space - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET REIFIES A LOGIC THAT WAS ALWAYS ALREADY THERE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10986) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-069 — THE POWER OF CONVERSATION — Gloria Origgi > Each time I find myself in the end of the afternoon still writing messages to friends, colleagues, perfect strangers, students, etc. I have the guilty feeling of having wasted my day, as the weakness of my will had prevailed on any sense of duty and intellectual responsibility. Psychological reactions can be harsh to the point of inflicting myself various forms of punishment such as imprisonment in a dusty Parisian library without Internet connection or voluntary switching off of the modem at my place. That is because I have the precise idea that my work is NOT writing emails: rather it is a matter of writing papers and learned essays on philosophy and related issues. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher and Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Author, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE POWER OF CONVERSATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11141) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-070 — A SMALL PRICE TO PAY — Stephen M. Kosslyn > Regarding memory: Once I look up something on the Internet, I don't need to retain all the details for future use — I know where to find that information again, and can quickly and easily do so. More generally, the Internet functions as if it is my memory. This function of the Internet is particularly striking when I'm writing; I no longer am comfortable writing if I'm not connected to the Internet. It's become completely natural to check facts as I write, taking a minute or two to dip into PubMed, Wikipedia, or the like. When I write with a browser open in the background, it feels like the browser is an extension of myself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A SMALL PRICE TO PAY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10844) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-071 — I AM NOT EXACTLY A THINKING PERSON — I AM A POET — Jonas Mekas > I would like to add one more note to what the Internet has done to me. And that is, I began paying more attention to everything that the Internet seems to be eliminating.Books especially. But also nature. In short: the more it all expands into the virtual reality the more I feel a need to love and protect the actual reality. Not because of sentimental reasons, no. I do that from a very real, practical , almost a survival need: from my knowledge that I would lose a very essential part of myself by losing the actual reality, both cultural and physical. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Film-Maker, Critic; Co-founder, Film-Makers' Cooperative, Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I AM NOT EXACTLY A THINKING PERSON — I AM A POET](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11000) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-072 — REAL ETHEREAL ETHER: A MILLION LEMMINGS CAN BE WRONG — Kai Krause > Has the Internet changed my own thinking? Dramatically so. Not at the neuron level, but more abstractly: it completely redefined how we perceive the world and ourselves in it, new models of how we work and research, entertain ourselves, communicate with our family and friends, how we learn about the past and preserve our memories, what we expect of the future and how we plan for it, what we watch, read, listen to: all greatly influenced by technology in general and the Net in particular. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [REAL ETHEREAL ETHER: A MILLION LEMMINGS CAN BE WRONG](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10859) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-073 — PUBLIC DREAMING — Thomas Metzinger > Consciousness is the space of attentional agency: Conscious information is exactly that information in your brain to which you can deliberately direct your attention. As an attentional agent, you can initiate a shift in attention and, as it were, direct your inner flashlight at certain targets: a perceptual object, say, or a specific feeling. In many situations, people lose the property of attentional agency, and consequently their sense of self is weakened. Infants cannot control their visual attention; their gaze seems to wander aimlessly from one object to another, because this part of their Ego is not yet consolidated. Another example of consciousness without attentional control is the non-lucid dream state. In other cases, too, such as severe drunkenness or senile dementia, you may lose the ability to direct your attention — and, correspondingly, feel that your "self" is falling apart. - **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:** 141 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [PUBLIC DREAMING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11014) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-074 — THE GREATEST OF ALL TRAITS: THE INTERNET HAS BECOME INHERENTLY BORING — Andrian Kreye > All this might not constitute a change in thinking though. I haven't changed my mind or my convictions because of the Internet. I haven't had any epiphanies while sitting in front of a screen. The Internet so far has not given me no memorable experiences, although it might have helped to usher some along. It has always been people, places and experiences that have changed the way I think and provided me with a wide variety of memorable experiences. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [THE GREATEST OF ALL TRAITS: THE INTERNET HAS BECOME INHERENTLY BORING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10873) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-075 — MY JUDGEMENT ENHANCER — Geoffrey Miller > The Internet changes every aspect of thinking for the often-online human: perception, categorization, attention, memory, spatial navigation, language, imagination, creativity, problem-solving, Theory of Mind, judgment, and decision-making. These are the key research areas in cognitive psychology, and constitute most of what the human brain does. BBC News and The Economist Website extend my perception, becoming my sixth sense for world events. Gmail structures my attention through my responses to incoming messages: delete, respond, or star for response later? Wikipedia is my extended memory. An online calendar changes how I plan my life. Google Maps change how I navigate through my city and world. FaceBook expands my Theory of Mind — better understanding the beliefs and desires of others. - **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:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [MY JUDGEMENT ENHANCER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11028) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-076 — THE FLAWS OF THE LATEST POP VERSION OF THE INTERNET HAVE MADE ME MORE OF A BIOLOGICAL REALIST, AND IN PARTICULAR HAVE MADE ME MORE SENSITIVE TO NEOTENY — Jaron Lanier > The current mainstream, dominant culture of the Internet is the descendant of what used to be the radical culture of the early Internet. The ideas are unfortunately motivated to a significant degree by a denial of the biological nature of personhood. The new true believers attempt to conceive of themselves as becoming ever more like abstract immortal information machines, instead of messy, mortal, embodied creatures. This is nothing but yet another approach to an ancient folly; the psychological denial of ageing and dying. To be a biological realist today is to hold a minority opinion during an age of profound, overbearing, technologically-enriched groupthink. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE FLAWS OF THE LATEST POP VERSION OF THE INTERNET HAVE MADE ME MORE OF A BIOLOGICAL REALIST, AND IN PARTICULAR HAVE MADE ME MORE SENSITIVE TO NEOTENY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10888) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-077 — CONTEXT IS KING — Dave Morin > Making the Internet more social enabled people to share their real name, likeness, voice, and the things that they are connected to. Now we always have an understanding of who is talking, who and what they are connected to, what they are saying, and to whom; through understanding identity and social context we have achieved greater openness as a society. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Internet Entrepreneur; Angel Investor - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [CONTEXT IS KING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11042) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-078 — THE MOST ACCURATE MEMORIES ARE THE ONES NEVER REMEMBERED — Joseph LeDoux > Reconsolidation is essentially an updating process. After consolidation, a memory remains unchanged until it is retrieved. At that point, the brain has the opportunity to incorporate new information into the memory, things that have been learned since the memory was stored initially. I haven't thought about the Edge Annual Question since last year, but now that I have been forced to remember it, my memory of it includes the new question. - **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:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE MOST ACCURATE MEMORIES ARE THE ONES NEVER REMEMBERED](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10902) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Memory/Each Use of a Memory Changes the Memory by Joseph LeDoux|Each Use of a Memory Changes the Memory by Joseph LeDoux]] ### EDGE2010-079 — WHAT DO WE THINK ABOUT? WHO GETS TO DO THE THINKING? — Evgeny Morozov > The "who" question — i.e. who gets to do the thinking in the digital age — is much trickier. The most obvious answer — that the Internet has democratized access to knowledge and we are all thinkers now, bowing over our keyboards much like the character of Rodin's famous sculpture — is wrong. One of my greatest fears is that the Internet would widen the gap between the disengaged masses and the over engaged elites, thus thwarting our ability to collectively solve global problems — climate change and the need for smarter regulation in the financial industry come to mind — that require everyone's immediate attention. The Internet may yield more "thinking" about such issues but such "thinking" would not be equally distributed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy; Syndicated Columnist; Author, The Net Delusion - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [WHAT DO WE THINK ABOUT? WHO GETS TO DO THE THINKING?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11056) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-080 — I DON'T TRUST ALGORITHM LIKE I TRUST INTUITION — Xeni Jardin > I don't believe there's such a thing as too much information. I don't believe Google makes us dumber, or that prolonged Internet fasts or a return to faxes are a necessary part of mind health. But data without the ability to divine is useless. I don't trust algorithm like I trust intuition: the art of dowsing through data. Once, wisdom was measured by memory, by the capacity to store and process and retrieve on demand. But we have tools for that now. We made machines that became shared extensions of mind. How will we define wisdom now? I don't know, but I can ask. - **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:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I DON'T TRUST ALGORITHM LIKE I TRUST INTUITION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10761) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-081 — THE REFINEMENT OF INFORMATION — Andrew Lih > We have only started to consider the implications in the visual and multimedia domain. Today, we lack the sufficient tools to do so, but we will see more collaborative creation, editing and filtering of visual content and temporal media. Inevitably, the same creative stigmergic effect in the audio-visual domain from Internet-enabled collaboration will result in works of knowledge beyond our current imagination. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Journalism, American University; Author, The Wikipedia Revolution - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE REFINEMENT OF INFORMATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10916) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-082 — THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL AMPLIFIER — David G. Myers > Thanks to the collective efficacy of our virtual community, hearing aid compatible assistive listening has spread to other communities and states. New York City is installing it in 488 subway information booths. Leaders in the American Academy of Audiology and the Hearing Loss Association of America are discussing how to promote this inexpensive, wireless assistive listening. Several state hearing loss associations are recommending it. The hearing industry is now including the needed magnetic receiver in most hearing aids and cochlear implants. And new companies have begun manufacturing and marketing hearing loop systems. Voila!, a grassroots, Internet-fueled transformation in how America provides listening assistance is underway. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET AS SOCIAL AMPLIFIER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11070) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-083 — THE LARGE INFORMATION COLLIDER, BDTS, AND GRAVITY HOLIDAYS ON TUESDAY — Paul Kedrosky > Because like most people I know, I worry noisily and loudly that the Internet has made me incapable of having BDTs. I feel sure that I used to have such things, but for some reason I no longer do. Maybe the Internet has damaged me — I've informed myself to death! — to the point that I don't know what big, deep thoughts are, or that the brain chemicals formerly responsible for their emergence are now doing something else. Then again, this smacks of historical romanticism, like remembering the skies as always being blue and summers as eternal when you were eight years old. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, Infectious Greed; General Partner, SK Ventures - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE LARGE INFORMATION COLLIDER, BDTS, AND GRAVITY HOLIDAYS ON TUESDAY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10775) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-084 — MOVE ASIDE, SEX — Seth Lloyd > For the moment, however, the ability of the Internet to propagate information promiscuously is largely a blessing. The preprint archives where scientific work (like my wrong paper) are posted for all to read are great levelers: a second- or third-world scientist with a modem can access the unedited state of the art in a scientific field as it is produced, rather than months or years later. They, in turn, can produce and post their own unedited preprints, and so on. As long as computer memories keep doubling in capacity every year or two, those stacks of unedited information will keep doubling and doubling, too, swamping the useful and correct in a sea of extraneous bits. Eventually, the laws of physics themselves will stop this exponential explosion of memory space, and we will be forced, once more, to edit. What will happen then? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 142 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [MOVE ASIDE, SEX](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10929) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-085 — DARE, CARE AND SHARE — Tor Nørretranders > The Internet has become the engine of gift economy and cooperation. The simple insight that there is so much more knowledge, data and wisdom out there than I can ever attend in a lifetime, shows me that life is not about collecting information into a depot of books, theorems, rote memories or titles. Life is about sharing with others what you have. Use it, share it, pick it when you need it. There is plenty out there. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [DARE, CARE AND SHARE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11085) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-086 — AN INTERMEDIA WITH 2 BILLION SCREENS PEERING INTO IT — Kevin Kelly > Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and "the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age." Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that "the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general is not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [AN INTERMEDIA WITH 2 BILLION SCREENS PEERING INTO IT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10789) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-087 — CHANGING THE WAY WE TEACH — Gary Marcus > I am not sure the Internet has changed the way we think so much as the way we act. Information has become cheap, and spend more time on-line than in libraries, but there's been no biological evolution: human brains remain human brains, with a finite capacity for absorbing information and host of cognitive biases that impair our judgements. People have vastly more information at their disposal now, but it doesn't mean they know how to use that information wisely. Teenagers, for example, often gauge the reliability of a Website by how slick a site is, rather than on the nature of the site's sources. My suggestion? Let us use the Internet as an impetus for completely rebooting our educational system, reorienting it from its current but antiquated 18th century emphasis on memorization — pointless in the age of Wikipedia — to a more modern emphasis on critical thinking skills, on metacognition and decision-making. Instead of teaching kids mere facts we should be teaching children how to reason, reflect, plan, investigate and evaluate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 172 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [CHANGING THE WAY WE TEACH](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10943) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-088 — EDGE A TO Z (PARS PRO TOTO) — Hans Ulrich Obrist > D is for Doubt A certain unreliability of technical and material information on the Internet brings us to the notion of doubt. I feel that doubt has become more pervasive. The artist Carsten Höller has invented the Laboratory of Doubt, which is opposed to mere representation. As he has told me, 'Doubt and perplexity ... are unsightly states of mind we'd rather keep under lock and key because we associate them with uneasiness, with a failure of values'. Höller's credo is not to do; not to intervene. To exist is to do and not to do is a way of doing. 'Doubt is alive; it paralyzes certainty.' (Carsten Höller) - **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:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [EDGE A TO Z (PARS PRO TOTO)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11099) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-089 — NOTES FROM A FILM DIRECTOR — Hu Fang > As required, each of them has to say a few words via the camera to their loved ones each day; most of the time, these revolve around their recollections on the past, realizations about life and confessions when their consciences are pricked. These in turn elicit widespread national tears. When the participants look right into the camera, and speak to their loved ones with deep emotions, in actual fact, they are gazing at the audience, confiding in them with great sentiment. Time and time again, this experience reiterates to them: what is important is not leaving good impressions on the opposite sex in that glass house, but rather, winning the favor of the audiences outside the glass house. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer, Co-founder OF Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou and the shop in Beijing, China - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [NOTES FROM A FILM DIRECTOR](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10418) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-090 — "TIME" AND AGING — Ralph Gibson > From my point of view the next great watershed that influenced our perception of time has been the arrival of the Internet. I know that it certainly speeds things up etc. but beyond this obvious fact there seems to be much more to it as an experience. I believe that there is a metaphysical element that surely the mystics could define. But for me the most blatant phenomena is that my life has to an extent compressed to the extent that I am not only aging in the conventional sense but also not aging, due to the fact that rather than losing information with the passing of "time" I am in fact accruing more and more information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Art Photographer - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** ["TIME" AND AGING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10530) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-091 — CONNECTING THROUGH CONTACT, NOT ELECTRICITY — Unattributed Edge contributor > When we contact another human being? holding hands, touching a cheek? we are doing something that is evolutionarily ancient. Our primate ancestors did it all the time, and do it today: they groom. Yes, grooming removes bugs, but it has a massive social effect. It jazzes up the feel-good chemistry of the brain, the endorphins. Travel to a hunter-gather society, or watch National Geographic, and you will witness people in contact. To contact is to connect. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [CONNECTING THROUGH CONTACT, NOT ELECTRICITY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10665) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-092 — PARALLEL COMMUNICATIONS — Christine Finn > Then — joy! — luxuriating in the always-on technology at my friends' homes in the Bay Area, where even the kitchens had laptops panting to 'go search'. But as I made those flights east, the differential was widening. I lost hours trawling the streets of European cities for an Internet cafe, to feel it was merely a brushed kiss from a stranger; there's always be someone else in line. I had the taste and knew tech was building on tech out there in the ether. I was like some Woody Allen character, gazing out of an empty carriage window into a train full of revelers. Being barred from the Web felt like a personal blow; I'd lost the key to the library. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [PARALLEL COMMUNICATIONS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10427) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-093 — OUTSOURCING THE MIND — Gerd Gigerenzer > Most of us can no longer memorize hour-long folktales and songs as in an oral tradition. The average modern mind has a poorly trained long-term memory, forgets rather quickly, and searches for information more in outside sources such as books instead inside memory. The Internet has amplified this trend of shifting knowledge from the inside to the outside, and taught us new strategies for finding what one wants using search machines. - **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:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [OUTSOURCING THE MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10541) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-094 — FROM JACK KEROUAC TO THE PENTATONIC SCALE — Jesse Dylan > Today, the Internet permeates pretty much all of my thoughts and actions. I access it with my phone, my computer, at home, at work. It gives me untold quantities of new knowledge, inspiration, the ability to connect. I interact with people all over the world from different fields and walks of life, and I see myself and others becoming interconnected hubs of information that the full range of human experience passes through. With the Internet, I feel like I am never truly alone, with the very ends of the Earth a few clicks away. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Filmmaker; Founder, Wondros - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [FROM JACK KEROUAC TO THE PENTATONIC SCALE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10341) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-095 — I NOW EXPECT TO HEAR WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK — Marti Hearst > Sure, we used email in the early eighties, and there were online bulletin boards for at least a decade before the Web, but only a small percentage of the population used them, and usually over a very slow modem. In the early days of the Web, ordinary people's voices were limited primarily to information ghettos like Geocities; most text was produced by academics and businesses. There was very little give-and-take. By contrast, according to a 2009 Pew study, 51% of Internet users now post content online that they have created themselves, and 1 in 10 Americans post something online for others to see every day. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I NOW EXPECT TO HEAR WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10679) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-096 — REPLACING EXPERIENCE WITH FACSIMILE — Eric Fischl > Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist's vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visual Artists - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [REPLACING EXPERIENCE WITH FACSIMILE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10436) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-097 — TWEET ME NICE — Ian Gold > Some of the best evidence for this idea is that there is a relation in primates between brain size (more precisely, relative neocortical volume) and the size of the social group in which the members of the species live: bigger brain, bigger group. Plotting social group as a function of brain size in primates allows us to extrapolate to humans. The anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, calculated that the volume of the human cortex predicts a social group of 150 — about the size of the villages that would have constituted our social environment for a great deal of evolutionary time, and which can still be found in "primitive" societies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Canada Research Chair in Philosophy & Psychiatry, McGill University; Coauthor (with Joel Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [TWEET ME NICE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10552) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-098 — INFORMATION METABOLISM — Esther Dyson > Worse than that, over a long period, many of us are genetically disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much of it. It makes us sick long-term, as well as giving us indigestion and hypoglycemic fits. Could that be true of information sugar as well? Will we become allergic to it even as we crave it? And what will serve as information insulin? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [INFORMATION METABOLISM](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10349) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-099 — THE INTERNET IS A CULTURAL OBJECT: READ IT — Virginia Heffernan > Philosophers and critics must only be careful, as we are trained to be careful, not to mistake this new, highly stylized and artificial order, the Internet, for reality itself. After all, all cultural forms and conceits that gain currency and influence — epic poetry, the Catholic mass, the British empire, photography —do so by purporting to be reality, to be transparent, to represent or proscribe life as it really is. As an arrangement of interlocking high, pop and folk art forms, the Internet is no different. This ought to be especially clear when what's meant by "the Internet" is that mostly comic, intensely commercial bourgeois space known as the World Wide Web. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Columnist, The New York Times Magazine; Editorial Director, West Studios; Author, Magic and Loss - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET IS A CULTURAL OBJECT: READ IT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10693) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-100 — REPLACING EXPERIENCE WITH FACSIMILE — Anthony Aguirre > Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist's vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz; Author, Cosmological Koans - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [REPLACING EXPERIENCE WITH FACSIMILE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10445) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-101 — TWEET ME NICE — Joel Gold > Some of the best evidence for this idea is that there is a relation in primates between brain size (more precisely, relative neocortical volume) and the size of the social group in which the members of the species live: bigger brain, bigger group. Plotting social group as a function of brain size in primates allows us to extrapolate to humans. The anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, calculated that the volume of the human cortex predicts a social group of 150 — about the size of the villages that would have constituted our social environment for a great deal of evolutionary time, and which can still be found in "primitive" societies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [TWEET ME NICE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10563) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-102 — KAYAKS vs CANOES — George Dyson > The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material— by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [KAYAKS vs CANOES](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10357) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-103 — THE DAWN OF THE ENTANGLEMENT — W. Daniel Hillis > Now multiply this picture by a million fold, to include not just the one fleet of trucks, but all the airplanes, gas pipelines, hospitals, factories, oil refineries, mines and power plants not to mention the salesmen, advertisers, media distributors, insurance companies, regulators, financiers and stock traders. You will begin to perceive the entangled system that makes so many of our day-to-day decisions. Although we created it, we did not exactly design it. It evolved. Our relationship to it is similar to our relationship to our biological ecosystem. We are co-dependent, and not entirely in control. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [THE DAWN OF THE ENTANGLEMENT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10707) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-104 — TAKE LOVE — Helen Fisher > Moreover, in the ever-present gossip circles, a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor's hunting skills, even whether he was amusing, kind or smart. We think it's natural to court a totally unknown person in a bar or club. But it's far more natural to know a few basic things about an individual before meeting him or her. Internet dating sites, chat rooms, social networking sites provide these details, enabling the modern human brain to pursue more comfortably its ancestral mating dance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [TAKE LOVE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10454) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-105 — I'M STARTING TO THINK LIKE THE INTERNET, STARTING TO THINK LIKE BIOLOGY — Nigel Goldenfeld > To see why this is a big deal for me, consider the following "homework hack". You want to become an instant expert in something that matters to you: maybe a homework assignment, maybe researching a life-threatening disease afflicting someone close to you. You can research it on the Internet using a search engine… but as you know, you can search, but you can't really find. Google gives you unstructured information, but for a young person in a hurry, that is simply not good enough. Search engines are linear, predictable and essentially an uninteresting way to use the Internet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [I'M STARTING TO THINK LIKE THE INTERNET, STARTING TO THINK LIKE BIOLOGY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10575) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-106 — SIX WAYS THE INTERNET MAY SAVE CIVILIZATION — David M. Eagleman > The tangle of events that trigger societal collapse can be complex, and there are several existential threats the Internet does not address. Nonetheless, it appears that vast, networked communication can serve as an antidote to several of the most common and fatal diseases of civilization. Almost by accident, we now command the capacity for self-quarantining, retaining knowledge, speeding information flow, reducing censorship, actualizing human capital, and saving energy resources. So the next time a co-worker laments about Internet addiction, the banality of tweets, or the decline of face-to-face conversation, I will sanguinely suggest that the Internet — even with all its flashy wastefulness — may just be the technology that saves us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Incognito, Sum, The Brain - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [SIX WAYS THE INTERNET MAY SAVE CIVILIZATION](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10365) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-107 — THE SCULPTING OF HUMAN THOUGHT — Donald D. Hoffman > Natural selection sculpts human thought across generations and at geologic time scales. Fitness is its tool, and human nature, our shared endowment as members of a species, is among its key effects. Although the thought life of each person is unique, one can discern patterns of thought that transcend racial, cultural and occupational differences; similarly, although the face of each person is unique, one can discern patterns of physiognomy — two eyes above a nose above a mouth — that transcend individual differences. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [THE SCULPTING OF HUMAN THOUGHT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10721) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-108 — EVOLVING A GLOBAL BRAIN — W. Tecumseh Fitch > The other approach involved a novel cell type specialized for information processing: the neuron. While the endocrine approach works fine for plants and fungi, metazoans (multicellular animals) move, sense and act, requiring a more subtle neural form of control. From the beginning, neurons were organized into networks: they are teamworkers collaboratively processing information and reaching group decisions. Only neurons at the final output stage, like motor neuron, retain direct power over the body. And even motor neurons must act together to produce coordinated movement rather than uncontrolled twitching. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; Author, The Evolution of Language - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [EVOLVING A GLOBAL BRAIN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10464) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-109 — THE STRANGERS IN THE CRIB — Alison Gopnik > My experience of the Web, feels fragmented, discontinuous, effortful (and interesting!) because, for adults, learning a new technology depends on conscious, attentive, intentional processing. In adults, this kind of conscious attention is a very limited resource. This is even true at the neural level. When we pay attention to something, the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for conscious goal-directed planning, controls the release of cholinergic transmitters, chemicals that help us learn, to certain very specific parts of the brain. So as we wrestle with a new technology we adults can only change our minds a little bit at a time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [THE STRANGERS IN THE CRIB](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10587) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-110 — THE INTERNET AS REALITY PRODUCER — Olafur Eliasson > Being a profoundly democratic medium, opening up unprecedented possibilities of self-expression, freedom of the press and access to information, the Internet is not only the source of unlimited access to knowledge, but paradoxically enough also the breeding ground of a general acceptance of a lack of competences. Large social communities such as Facebook, which do not produce or exchange any kind of knowledge, seem to flourish, and because search machines are based on trivial algorithmic principles of recognition, it can be hard to find the qualified, critical voices in the bulk of information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET AS REALITY PRODUCER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10373) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-111 — I CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE BECAUSE OF THE INTERNET — Bruce Hood > Last year, on the request of my publisher, I started a blog to comment on weird and bizarre examples of supernatural thinking from around the world. From the outset I thought that blogging was a self-indulgent activity but I agreed to give it a whirl to help promote my book. In spite of my initial reluctance I very soon became addicted to feedback. It was not enough to post blogs for some unseen audience. I needed the validation from visitors that my efforts and opinions were appreciated. Within weeks, I had become a numbers junkie looking for more and more hits. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [I CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE BECAUSE OF THE INTERNET](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10736) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-112 — THE DAZED STATE — Richard Foreman > How is the Internet changing the way I think? But what is it — this doing "thinking" that I assume I do along with everybody else? Probably there is no agreement about what this "thinking" consists of. But I certainly do not believe "gathering information" is thinking — and that has obviously been an activity that has expanded and sped up as a result of the Internet. But for me —” to "think" is to withdraw from gathered information into a blankness within which something arises — pops out— is born. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Playwright & Director; Founder, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE DAZED STATE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10475) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-113 — THE DUMB BUTLER — Joshua D. Greene > Have you ever read a great book from before the mid 1990s and thought to yourself, "My Goodness! These ideas are so primitive! So… pre-Internet!" Me neither. The Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads. This is because the Internet doesn't (yet) know how to think. We still have to do it for ourselves, and we do it the old-fashioned way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Neuroscientist and Philosopher, Harvard University - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE DUMB BUTLER](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10598) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-114 — THE 'AUTHENTIC' HAS REPLACED THE REPRODUCIBLE — Olafur Eliasson > I notice that more of my time is spent in words and language — because that is the currency of the Net — than it was before. My notebooks take longer to fill. I notice that I mourn the passing of the fax machine, a more personal communication tool than email because it allowed the use of drawing and handwriting. I notice that my mind has reset to being primarily linguistic rather than, for example, visual. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE 'AUTHENTIC' HAS REPLACED THE REPRODUCIBLE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10382) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-115 — THE EVOLVING GIANT — Nick Isaac > "Standing on giant's shoulders" is a common metaphor for scientific progress. In order to be a scientist, one must first climb the body of the giant, i.e. the accumulated knowledge of previous generations. Reading the published work of other scientists is therefore the most fundamental activity that we perform as academics. The Internet is changing not just the way we use the giant, but also how the giant grows with the accretion of new knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Macroecologist, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Biological Research Centre (BRC), Oxfordshire - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE EVOLVING GIANT](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10748) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-116 — MY BODY, MY MIND — Fabrizio Gallanti > Due to the position in front of the screen of the computer and to the lack of physical exercise deriving by a too intense use of the Internet (to every advance in connection speed more hours of it) I developed two herniated discs in the cervical region (detected in 2005) and two herniated discs in the lumbar region (detected in 2008). The first two provoke numbness and a certain diminution of strength in my thumbs, while the two last ones determine sciatica pains in my right leg, which is variable but aggravated by the position used to navigate the Internet for long hours. So it hurts more in the weekdays. There was anyway a family history of hernias. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Fellow, Princeton University School of Architecture - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [MY BODY, MY MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10486) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-117 — HARMFUL ONE-LINERS, AN OCEAN OF FACTS AND REWIRED MINDS — Haim Harari > The Internet brings to us art treasures, ability to simulate complex experiments, mechanisms of learning by trial and error, explanations and lessons from the greatest teachers on earth, special aids for children of special needs, less need to memorize facts and numbers, and numerous other incomparable marvels, not available to previous generations. Anyone involved in teaching, from kindergarten to graduate school, must be aware of the endless opportunities, as well as of the lurking dangers. These changes in learning, when they materialize, may create an entirely different pattern of knowledge, understanding and thinking in the student mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [HARMFUL ONE-LINERS, AN OCEAN OF FACTS AND REWIRED MINDS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10611) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-118 — IMMORTALITY — Juan Enriquez > Future sociologists and archaeologists will have access to excruciatingly detailed pictures on an individual basis of what arrived, what was read, ignored, deleted, forwarded and responded to. Complement this stream of data with Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, newspapers, analyst reports, Flickr, and you get a far more concrete and complete picture of each and every one of us than even the most extraordinary detail found by historians on the most studied, respected and reviled of leaders. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [IMMORTALITY](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10391) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-119 — "GO NATIVE" — Howard Gardner > Several years ago, I had a chance conversation with Jonathan Fanton, then President of the MacArthur Foundation. He mentioned that the Foundation was sponsoring a major study, to the tune of 50 million dollars, of how young people are being changed by the new digital media, such as the Internet. At the time, as part of our GoodWork research Project, I was involved in studies of ethics and focusing particularly on the ethical orientation of young people. And so I asked Pres. Fanton "Are you looking at the ways in which the ethics of youth may be affected?" He told me that the Foundation had not thought about this issue. After several conversations and a grant application, our GoodPlay project, a social science study of ethics in the digital media, was launched. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** ["GO NATIVE"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10497) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-120 — THE JOY OF JUST-ENOUGHNESS — Judith Rich Harris > The Internet dispenses information the way a ketchup bottle dispenses ketchup. At first there was too little; now there is too much. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 22 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [THE JOY OF JUST-ENOUGHNESS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10623) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-121 — THINKING AND LIVING WITH THE INTERNET'S HELP — Daniel L. Everett > In the city from where I now do most of my work, the Internet has become an extension of my memory — it combats the occasional "senior moment", helping me to find names, facts, and places instantly (or so it seems). It gives me a second, bigger brain. The Internet has allowed me to learn from people I have never met. It placed me in a university that profoundly affected my career, my research, and my worldview. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [THINKING AND LIVING WITH THE INTERNET'S HELP](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10400) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-122 — THE VIRTUALIZATION OF THE UNIVERSE — David Gelernter > Virtualization has the important intellectual side-effect of leading us towards a better understanding of the relation between emergent properties & virtual machines or systems. Thus "I" am an emergent property of my body & mind; "I" (my subjective experience of the world & myself) am a virtual machine, of sorts; but "I" (or "consciousness") am just as real (despite being virtual) as the pull-down menu built of software — or the picture that emerges from the pixels. Like industrialization, virtualization is an intellectual as well as a technological & economic transition; like industrialization, it's a change in the texture of time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats) - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [THE VIRTUALIZATION OF THE UNIVERSE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10508) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Simulation/The Self May Be a Virtual Machine by David Gelernter|The Self May Be a Virtual Machine by David Gelernter]] ### EDGE2010-123 — THE UPLOAD HAS BEGUN — Sam Harris > Of course, more or less everyone has come to depend on the Internet in this way. Increasingly, however, I rely on Google to recall my own thoughts. Being lazy, I am prone to cannibalizing my work: something said in a lecture will get plowed into an op-ed; the op-ed will later be absorbed into a book; snippets from the book may get spoken in another lecture. This process will occasionally leave me wondering just how and where and to what shameful extent I have plagiarized myself. Once again, the gates of memory swing not from my own medial temporal lobes but from a computer cluster far away, presumably where the rent is lower. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [THE UPLOAD HAS BEGUN](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10637) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-124 — CONCEPTUAL COMPASSES FOR DEEPER GENERALISTS — Paul W. Ewald > I navigate through this storm of information using my favorite conceptual compass: Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Application of evolutionary principles often draws attention to paradoxes and flaws in arguments. These problems, if recognized, are often swept under the rug, but they become unavoidably conspicuous when the correct alternative argument is formulated. One of my research strategies is to identify medical conventional wisdom that is inconsistent with evolutionary principles. I then formulate alternative explanations that are consistent and then evaluate all of them with evidence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [CONCEPTUAL COMPASSES FOR DEEPER GENERALISTS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10409) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-125 — THE INTERNET'S INSIGHTS — Neil Gershenfeld > The Internet is many things: good and bad (and worse) business models, techno-libertarian governance and state censors, information and misinformation, empowerment and addiction. But at heart it is the machine with the most parts ever created. What I've learned from the Internet comes not from Web 2.0 or anything else.0, it's the original insights from the pioneers that made its spectacular growth possible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [THE INTERNET'S INSIGHTS](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10519) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2010-126 — REPETITION, NOT TRUTH — Daniel Haun > Let me try and give you an example of the way people think. The way you think. I have already told you three times that the Internet hasn't changed the way you think (4 and counting) and every time you are reading it, my statement becomes more believable to you. Psychologists have reported the human tendency to mistake repetition for truth for more than sixty years. This is called the "illusion of truth effect". You believe to be true what you hear often. The same applies to whatever comes to mind first or most easily. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Early Child Development and Culture, Director, Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig University - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [REPETITION, NOT TRUTH](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10651) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted