# Edge 2014 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement) - **Archive year:** 2014 - **Response rows represented:** 183 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 183 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 3 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 2 - **Not yet promoted:** 180 ## 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 ### EDGE2014-001 — Introduction: The 2014 Edge Question — John Brockman > The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers of knowledge in the areas of evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Some of the fundamental questions posed are: Where did the universe come from? Where did life come from? Where did the mind come from? Emerging out of the third culture is a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems,, whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself, were not constructed by design; all have evolved. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, Edge.org; Chairman of Brockman, Inc.; Author, By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Introduction: The 2014 Edge Question](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25545) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-002 — The Theory of Everything — Geoffrey West > Let me elaborate. The search for grand syntheses, for commonalities, regularities, ideas and concepts that transcend the narrow confines of specific problems or disciplines is one of the great inspirational drivers of science and scientists. Arguably, it is also a defining characteristic of homo sapiens sapiens. Perhaps the binomial form of sapiens is some distorted poetic recognition of this. Like the invention of gods and God, the concept of A Theory of Everything connotes the grandest vision of all, the inspiration of all inspirations, namely that we can encapsulate and understand the entirety of the universe in a small set of precepts, in this case, a concise set of mathematical equations. Like the concept of God, however, it is potentially misleading and intellectually dangerous. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physcicist; Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Theory of Everything](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25574) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-003 — The Theory of Everything — Geoffrey West > Let me elaborate. The search for grand syntheses, for commonalities, regularities, ideas and concepts that transcend the narrow confines of specific problems or disciplines is one of the great inspirational drivers of science and scientists. Arguably, it is also a defining characteristic of homo sapiens sapiens. Perhaps the binomial form of sapiens is some distorted poetic recognition of this. Like the invention of gods and God, the concept of A Theory of Everything connotes the grandest vision of all, the inspiration of all inspirations, namely that we can encapsulate and understand the entirety of the universe in a small set of precepts, in this case, a concise set of mathematical equations. Like the concept of God, however, it is potentially misleading and intellectually dangerous. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physcicist; Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Theory of Everything](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25572) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-004 — The Theory of Everything — Geoffrey West > Let me elaborate. The search for grand syntheses, for commonalities, regularities, ideas and concepts that transcend the narrow confines of specific problems or disciplines is one of the great inspirational drivers of science and scientists. Arguably, it is also a defining characteristic of homo sapiens sapiens. Perhaps the binomial form of sapiens is some distorted poetic recognition of this. Like the invention of gods and God, the concept of A Theory of Everything connotes the grandest vision of all, the inspiration of all inspirations, namely that we can encapsulate and understand the entirety of the universe in a small set of precepts, in this case, a concise set of mathematical equations. Like the concept of God, however, it is potentially misleading and intellectually dangerous. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physcicist; Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute; Author, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Theory of Everything](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25573) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-005 — There is No Reality in the Quantum World — Anton Zeilinger > The idea to be abandoned is the idea that there is no reality in the quantum world. The idea probably came about because of two reasons. On the one hand, because of the fact that one cannot always ascribe a precise value to a physical property, and on the other hand, because within the wide spectrum of interpretations of quantum mechanics some suggest that the quantum state does not describe an external reality, but rather that the properties only come about in the mind of the observer and therefore that consciousness plays a crucial role. - **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:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [There is No Reality in the Quantum World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25548) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-006 — M-theory / String Theory is the Only Game in Town — Eric R. Weinstein > To recall, modern physics rests on a stool with three classical geometric legs first fashioned individually by Einstein, Maxwell, and Dirac. The last two of those legs can be together retrofitted to a quantum theory of force and matter known as the 'standard model', while the first stubbornly resists any such attempt at an upgrade, rendering the semi-quantum stool unstable and useless. It is from this that the children of Bohr have derived the need to convert the children of Einstein to the quantum religion at all costs so that the stool can balance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [M-theory / String Theory is the Only Game in Town](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25547) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-007 — Moore's Law — Andrian Kreye > First and foremost Moore's Law has allowed to perceive the development of the digital era as a linear narrative. The simple curve of progression is the digital equivalent of the ancient wheat and chessboard problem (with a potentially infinite chessboard). Like the Persian inventor of the game of chess who demanded from the king a geometric progression of grains all across the board, digital technology seems to develop exponentially. This model ignores the parallel nature of digital progress, which encompasses not only technological or economic development, but scientific, social and political change. Changes that can rarely be quantified. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Moore's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25543) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-008 — Moore's Law — Unattributed Edge contributor > First and foremost Moore's Law has allowed to perceive the development of the digital era as a linear narrative. The simple curve of progression is the digital equivalent of the ancient wheat and chessboard problem (with a potentially infinite chessboard). Like the Persian inventor of the game of chess who demanded from the king a geometric progression of grains all across the board, digital technology seems to develop exponentially. This model ignores the parallel nature of digital progress, which encompasses not only technological or economic development, but scientific, social and political change. Changes that can rarely be quantified. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Moore's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25542) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-009 — People Are Sheep — David Berreby > The "people are sheep" model sets us up to think in terms of obedience or defiance, dumb conformity versus solitary self-assertion (to avoid being a sheep, you must be a lone wolf). It does not recognize that people need to place their trust in others, and win the trust of others, and that this guides their behavior. (Stanley Milgram's famous experiments, where men were willing to give severe shocks to a supposed stranger, are often cited as Exhibit A for the "people are sheep" model. But what these studies really tested was the trust the subjects had in the experimenter.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [People Are Sheep](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25541) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-010 — Information Overload — Jay Rosen > Suppose we learn from news reports that the National Security Agency "broke" encryption on the Internet. That's information! It reduces uncertainty about how far the U.S. government was willing to go. (All the way.) But the same report increases uncertainty about whether there will continue to be a single Internet, setting us up for more information when that larger picture becomes clearer. So information is a measure of uncertainty reduced, but also of uncertainty created. Which is probably what we mean when we say: "well, that raises more questions than it answers." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Information Overload](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25540) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-011 — Universal Grammar — Benjamin K. Bergen > An influential and appealing explanation is known as Universal Grammar: core commonalities across languages exist because they are part of our genetic endowment. On this view, humans are born with an innate predisposition to develop languages with very specific properties. Infants expect to learn a language that has nouns and verbs, that has sentences with embedded propositions, and so on. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Author, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Universal Grammar](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25539) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-012 — The Universe Began In A State Of Extraodinarily Low Entropy — Alan Guth > An interesting feature of this picture is that the universe need not have a beginning, but could be continued from where we started in both directions of time. Since the laws of evolution and the initial state are time-symmetric, the past will be statistically equivalent to the future. Observers in the deep past will see the arrow of time in the opposite direction from ours, but their experience will be no different from ours. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, MIT; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize; Author, The Inflationary Universe - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Universe Began In A State Of Extraodinarily Low Entropy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25538) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-013 — Long-Term Memory Is Immutable — Todd C. Sacktor > Two recent lines of evidence have relegated this dominant theory of long-term memory ready for retirement. First is the discovery of reconsolidation. When memories are recalled, they undergo a brief period in which they are once again susceptible to disruption by many of the same biochemical inhibitors that affect the initial conversion of short- into long-term memory. This means that long-term memories are not immutable, but can be converted into short-term memory, and then reconverted back into long-term memory. If this reconversion doesn't happen, the specific long-term memory is effectively disrupted. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Neurology, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Long-Term Memory Is Immutable](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25537) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Memory/Long-Term Memories Become Fragile When Recalled by Todd C. Sacktor|Long-Term Memories Become Fragile When Recalled by Todd C. Sacktor]] ### EDGE2014-014 — Heights And Lengths And Areas Of Rectangles — Robert Sapolsky > My problem with the concept is with the particularist use of "a" gene-environment interaction, the notion that there can be one. This is because, at the most benign, this implies that there can be cases where there aren't gene-environment interactions. Worse, that those cases are in the majority. Worst, the notion that lurking out there is something akin to a Platonic ideal as to every gene's actions—that any given gene has an idealized effect, that it consistently "does" that, and that circumstances where that does not occur are rare and represent either pathological situations or inconsequential specialty acts. Thus, a particular gene may have a Platonically "normal" effect on intelligence unless, of course, the individual was protein malnourished as a fetus, had untreated phenylketonuria, or was raised as a wild child by meerkats. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Heights And Lengths And Areas Of Rectangles](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25536) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-015 — Uniformity And Uniqueness Of The Universe — Andrei Linde > The situation is similar with respect to the uniqueness of the laws of physics. We knew, for example, that the electron mass is the same everywhere in the observable part of the universe, so the obvious assumption was that it must take the same value everywhere—that it was just a constant of nature. For a long time, one of the great goals of physics was to find a single theory—a Theory of Everything— that would unify all fundamental interactions and provide an unambiguous explanation for all known parameters of particle physics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Father of Eternal Chaotic Inflation; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Uniformity And Uniqueness Of The Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25535) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-016 — Race — Nina Jablonski > Race's latest makeover arises from genomics and mostly within biomedical contexts. The sanctified position of medical science in the popular consciousness gives the race concept renewed esteem. Racial realists marshal genomic evidence to support the hard biological reality of racial difference, while racial skeptics see no racial patterns. What is clear is that people are seeing what they want to see. They are constructing studies to provide the outcomes they expect. In 2012, Catherine Bliss argued cogently that race today is best considered a belief system that "produces consistencies in perception and practice at a particular social and historical moment". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist and Paleobiologist; Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Race](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25534) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-017 — Life Evolves Via A Shared Genetic Toolkit — Seirian Sumner > Genes and their interaction networks determine the phenotype of an organism—what it looks like and how it behaves. One of the biggest problems in modern evolutionary biology is understanding the relationship between genes and phenotypes. The prevailing theory is that all animals are built from essentially the same set of regulatory genes—a genetic toolkit, and that phenotypic variation within and between species arises simply by using shared genes differently. Scientists are now generating a vast amount of genomic data from an eclectic mix of organisms. These data are telling us to put to bed the idea that all life is underlain by a common toolkit of conserved genes. Instead, we need to turn our attention to the role of genomic novelty in the evolution of phenotypic diversity and innovation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Reader, Behavioral Ecology, University College London - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Life Evolves Via A Shared Genetic Toolkit](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25533) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-018 — Nature = Objects — Scott Sampson > Another part of the answer, I think, is to be found in education. We need to raise our children so that they see the world with new eyes. At the risk of heresy, it seems that science education in particular could be re-invigorated with subjectification in mind. Certainly the practice of science—the actual doing of scientific research—must be done as objectively as possible. But the communication of science could be done using both objective and subjective lenses. - **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:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Nature = Objects](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25532) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-019 — The Uncertainty Principle — Kai Krause > Let's say you are a scientist and you noticed a phenomenon you would like to tell the world about. "The brain...", you say, "... can listen to a conversation and make sense of the frequencies, decode them into symbols and meaning... but when it is confronted with two such conversations simultaneously, it cannot deal with both threads in parallel. At best it can try to switch back and forth quickly, trying to keep up with the information." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Uncertainty Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25531) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-020 — Associationism — Oliver Scott Curry > Unfortunately, a similar situation applies to the question 'How do animals learn?'. Textbooks will tell you that the answer is 'association', and will proceed to catalogue the various types (Classical, Operant), its laws (Rescorla-Wagner), and constraints (Autoshaping, Differential Conditionality, Blocking). You will be told that association is the ability of organisms to make connections between any given stimulus and any given outcome or response—the sound of a bell with the arrival of food, or the left-branch of a maze with the administration of pain—merely through (repeated) exposure to their pairing. And you will be told that, because association treats all stimuli equally, it can in principle enable an organism to learn anything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Researcher, Director, The Oxford Morals Project, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Associationism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25530) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-021 — Habitable Zone — Dimitar D. Sasselov > The habitable zone defines those distances from a star where a planet similar to Earth would have the surface temperatures for water to be liquid. In the Solar System this zone stretches from in-between the orbits of Venus and Earth out to Mars. Its boundaries are approximate as they are applied to different planetary systems and sometimes the concept is used more broadly, e.g., to galaxies. The habitable zone concept has a venerable history in the search for alien life beyond Earth and most recently it contributed to the spectacular success of the NASA Kepler exoplanet-hunting mission. However, in the post-Kepler era it is a scientific concept that is ready for retirement. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; Director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; Author, The Life of Super-Earths - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Habitable Zone](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25528) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-022 — Urvogel — Julia Clarke > As a paleontologist working on the evolution of living birds, I find myself having this exchange over and over again. For example, I describe a small feathery species newly uncovered from the fossil record. After detailing its known features, I might note that it may have had some form of aerial locomotion. There is inevitably a pause. Then the question, "Ok, but was it a bird?" Impatient with scientists and their endless modifiers and complex phrasing, the asker wants to get this story clear, "Ok, but did it fly?" Tell it to me straight. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** John A. Wilson Professor and HHMI Professor, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Urvogel](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25525) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-023 — Entropy — Bruce Parker > When looking at the Universe (whatever that entails, which may be more than our presently visible/observable universe) the First Law tells us that all the energy in the Universe will be conserved, although it may be converted into various forms. But the Second Law says that at some time in the future no more energy transformations can take place. The Universe will reach some stage of maximum entropy and thermal equilibrium. The Second Law essentially says that the Universe must have had a beginning and a end. That is very difficult to accept. The universe must be timeless, for if there was a beginning what was there before this beginning. Something cannot come out of nothing (and by "nothing" I mean the lack of anything, even things we do not know about yet). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visiting Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Entropy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25524) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-024 — Certainty. Absolute Truth. Exactitude. — Richard Saul Wurman > It would never be published in any academic circles today because it is not correct. The orbits are not circular; they are elliptical, they're not all on the same plane and the diagram is completely disproportionate and does not represent the distances between the planets or from the planets to the sun. It's a diagram of approximation. It's a diagram that give permission for others, as Tycho Brahe released his documentation and his measurements so that Kepler could come up with a more approximate notion of our planetary universe incorporating more accurate geometries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, TED Conference; EG Conference; TEDMED Conferences; Architect, Cartographer; Author, Information Architects - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Certainty. Absolute Truth. Exactitude.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25523) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-025 — Calculus — Andrew Lih > Calculus remains in many curricula as more of a rite of passage than for any particular need. It is one way of problem solving and it is a bellwether for the ability to absorb more complex ideas and concepts. But holding it up as a universal obstacle course through which one must pass to program and code is counterproductive, yet the bulk of computer science programs geared towards undergraduate education require it. Leaving in this obtuse math requirement is lazy curricular thinking. It sticks with a model that weeds out people for no good reason related to their ability to program. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Journalism, American University; Author, The Wikipedia Revolution - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Calculus](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25521) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-026 — We'll Never Hit Barriers To Scientific Understanding — Martin Rees > Nearly all scientists are "reductionists" insofar as they think that everything, however complicated, obeys the basic equations of physics. But even if we had a hypercomputer that could solve Schrodinger's equation for the immense aggregate of atoms in (say) breaking waves, migrating birds or tropical forests, an atomic-level explanation wouldn't yield the enlightenment we really seek. The brain is an assemblage of cells, and a painting is an assemblage of chemical pigment. But in both cases, what's interesting is the pattern and structure—the emergent complexity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [We'll Never Hit Barriers To Scientific Understanding](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25519) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-027 — Intelligence As a Property — Alexander Wissner-Gross > In particular, recent results have shown that an extremely rudimentary physical process called causal entropic forcing is able to replicate model versions of signature cognitive adaptive behaviors seen previously only in humans and certain non-human animal intelligence tests. These findings collectively suggest that a variety of key characteristics associated with human intelligence, including upright walking, tool use, and social cooperation, should instead be viewed as side effects of a deeper dynamical process that attempts to maximize future freedom of action. This freedom-maximizing process can only be meaningfully said to exist over an extended time period, and as such, is not a static property. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Inventor; Entrepreneur; Investor - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Intelligence As a Property](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25518) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-028 — The Way We Produce And Advance Science — Kathryn Clancy > The lives of scientists need to be prioritized over scientific discovery in the interest of actually doing better science. I know many of us operate on fear—fear of being scooped, fear of not getting tenure, fear of not having enough funding to do our work, fear even of being exploited ourselves. But we cannot let fear motivate a scheme that crushes potential bright future scientists. The criteria for scholarly excellence should not be based on who survives or evades poor treatment but who has the intellectual chops to make the most meaningful contributions. Thus, trainees need unions and institutional policies to protect them, and senior scientists to enact cultural change. An inclusive, humane workplace is actually the one that will lead to the most rigorous, world-changing scientific discoveries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Writer - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Way We Produce And Advance Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25516) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-029 — Moral Blank State-ism — Kiley Hamlin > Again, experience matters. Several studies have now documented that experience may influence moral outcomes via a "gene-environment interaction." That is, rather than a simple equation in which, say, adverse experiences lead to antisocial children: [child + abuse – ameliorating experiences = violence], the relationship between abuse and antisocial behavior is only observed in children with particular versions of various genes known to regulate certain social hormones. That is, whether they have been abused or not, children with the "safe" gene alleles are all about equally (un)likely to engage in antisocial behavior. Children with the "at risk" alleles, on the other hand, are more susceptible to the damages of abuse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Psychology, University of British Columbia - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Moral Blank State-ism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25515) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-030 — Scientific Knowledge Should Be Structured as "Literature" — Brian Christian > In my view, what's most outmoded within science, most badly in need of retirement, is the way we structure and organize scientific knowledge itself. Academic literature, even as it moves online, is a relic of the era of typesetting, modeled on static, irrevocable, toothpaste-out-of-the-tube publication. Just as the software industry has moved from a "waterfall" process to an "agile" process—from monolithic releases shipped from warehouses of mass-produced disks to over-the-air differential updates—so must academic publishing move from its current read-only model and embrace a process as dynamic, up-to-date, and collaborative as science itself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Most Human Human; Co-author (with Tom Griffiths), The Alignment Problem - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scientific Knowledge Should Be Structured as "Literature"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25514) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-031 — *The* Universe — Amanda Gefter > Leonard Susskind eventually solved the information paradox by insisting that we restrict our description of the world to either the region of spacetime outside the black hole's horizon or to the interior of the black hole. Either one is consistent—it's only when you talk about both that you violate the laws of physics. This "horizon complementarity," as it became known, tells us that the inside and outside of the black hole are not part and parcel of a single universe. They are two universes, but not in the same breath. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [*The* Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25513) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-032 — Big Data — Gary Marcus > No, I don't literally mean that we should stop believing in, or collecting, Big Data. But we should stop pretending that Big Data is magic. There are few fields that wouldn't benefit from large, carefully collected data sets. But lots of people, even scientists, put more stock in Big Data than they really should. Sometimes it seems like half the talk about understanding science these days, from physics to neuroscience, is about Big Data, and associated tools like "dimensionality reduction", "neural networks", "machine learning algorithms" and "information visualization". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Big Data](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25512) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-033 — The Illusion of Scientific Progress — Paul Saffo > Our optimism leads us to focus on the contents of this sphere, but its surface is more important for it is where knowledge ends and mystery begins. As our scientific knowledge expands, contact with the unknown grows as well. The result is not merely that we have mastered more knowledge (the sphere's volume), but we have encountered an ever-expanding body of previously unimaginable mysteries. A century ago, astronomers wondered whether our galaxy constituted the entire universe; now they tell us we probably live in an archipelago of universes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Illusion of Scientific Progress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25511) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-034 — Mental Illness is Nothing But Brain Illness — Joel Gold and Ian Gold > Of course, whatever it is about the social determinants of psychosis that makes them risk factors, they must have some downstream effect on the brain otherwise they would not raise the risk of schizophrenia, but they themselves are not neural phenomena any more than smoking is a biological phenomenon because it is a cause of lung cancer. The theory of schizophrenia will have to be more expansive, therefore, than the theory of the brain and its disorders. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds | Neuroscientist; Canada Research Chair in Philosophy & Psychiatry, McGill University; Coauthor (with Joel Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Mental Illness is Nothing But Brain Illness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25510) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-035 — Rational Actor Models: The Competence Corollary — Susan Fiske > The idea that people operate mainly in the service of narrow self-interest is already moribund, as social psychology and behavioral economics have shown. We now know that people are not rational actors, instead often operating on automatic, based on bias, or happy with hunches. Still, it's not enough to make us smarter robots, or to accept that we are flawed. The rational actor's corollary—all we need is to show more competence—also needs to be laid to rest. Even regular people who are not classical economists sometimes think that sheer cut-throat competence would be enough—on the job, in the marketplace, in school, and even at home. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Eugene Higgins Professor, Department of Psychology, Princeton University - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Rational Actor Models: The Competence Corollary](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25509) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-036 — Big Effects Have Big Explanations — Fiery Cushman > Next I looked at the 50 largest effects. These effects were much larger—about 100 times larger, on average. But they also tended to have many more explanations. Among those 50 largest effects, 25 of them had five explanations, but not even one of them had a single explanation. The first such single-explanation-effect was ranked 103 in size. (These examples help to make my point tangible, but its essence can be captured more succinctly: The standard deviation of the sum of two uncorrelated random variables is greater than the standard deviation of either individually). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Big Effects Have Big Explanations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25508) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-037 — The Altruism Hierarchy — Jamil Zaki > One common response I receive when presenting this work has grown increasingly bothersome. Often, an audience member will claim that if people experience helping as rewarding, then their actions are not "really" altruistic at all. The claim as I understand it traces back to the Kantian notion—embedded in the "cost to the helper" section of altruism's definition—that virtuous action is motivated by principle alone, and that cashing in on that action, whether through material gain or psychological pleasure, disqualifies it as being virtuous. Oftentimes, this contention devolves into long, animated, and (to my mind) useless attempts to find space for true altruism amid an avalanche of ulterior motives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Altruism Hierarchy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25507) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-038 — Only "Scientists" Can Do Science — Kate Mills > Currently, the majority of individuals funded or employed to conduct scientific experiments have been trained in traditional academic settings. This includes not only the 12 years of compulsory education, but also another 6 to 10 years of university education—which are often followed by years of post-doctoral training. While this formal academic training undoubtedly equips individuals with the tools and resources to become successful scientists, informally trained individuals of all ages are just as able to contribute to our knowledge of the world through science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Doctoral student, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Only "Scientists" Can Do Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25504) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-039 — Natural Selection is the Only Engine of Evolution — Athena Vouloumanos > These findings fit in a relatively new field of study called epigenetics. Epigenetic control of gene expression contributes to cells in a single organism (which share the same DNA sequence) developing differently into e.g. heart cells or neurons. But the last decade has shown actual evidence–and possible mechanisms–for how the environment and the organism's behavior in it might cause heritable changes in gene expression (with no change in the DNA sequence) that are passed onto offspring. In recent years, we have seen evidence of epigenetic inheritance across a wide range of morphological, metabolic, and even behavioral traits. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Director, NYU Infant Cognition and Communication Lab, New York University - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Natural Selection is the Only Engine of Evolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25502) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-040 — Altruism — Tor Nørretranders > Likewise, if you feel better and make more money when you are generous and contribute to the wellbeing and resources of other people—like in the welfare societies like my own Denmark that became very rich through sharing and equality—then the person who wants to keep everything for himself, with no gift-giving, no tax-paying and no openness, is just an amateur egoist. Real egoists share. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Altruism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25500) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-041 — Sadness is Always Bad, Happiness is Always Good — June Gruber > One idea in the study of emotion and its impact on psychological health is overdue for retirement: that negative emotions (like sadness or fear) are inherently bad or maladaptive for our psychological well-being, and positive emotions (like happiness or joy) are inherently good or adaptive. Such value judgments are to be understood, within the framework of affective science, as depending on whether an emotion impedes or fosters a person's ability to pursue goals, attain resources, and function effectively within society. Claims of the sort "sadness is inherently bad" or "happiness is inherently good" must be abandoned in light of burgeoning advances in the scientific study of human emotion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sadness is Always Bad, Happiness is Always Good](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25498) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-042 — Large Randomized Controlled Trials — Dean Ornish > For example, people often exercise with other people, and there's increasing evidence that enhanced social support significantly reduces the risk of most chronic diseases. You're also enhancing a sense of meaning and purpose by participating in a study, and these also have therapeutic benefits. And when people exercise, they often begin to eat healthier foods. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and President of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Large Randomized Controlled Trials](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25497) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-043 — Animal Mindlessness — Kate Jeffery > We humans have had a tough time coping with our unremarkable place in the grand scheme of things. First Copernicus trashed our belief that we live at the centre of the universe, followed shortly thereafter by Herschel and co. who suggested that our sun was not at the centre of it either; then Darwin came along and showed that according to our biological heritage, we are just another animal. But we have clung on for dear life to one remaining belief about our specialness; that we, and we alone, have conscious minds. It is time to retire, or indeed euthanize and cremate, this anthropocentric pomposity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University College London - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Animal Mindlessness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25496) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-044 — Crime is Only About The Actions Of Individuals — Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran > Current tools for organizing, associating and visualizing large amounts of data are useful for understanding the complexity of crime. Formulating explicative models through social network analysis or predictive models through machine learning that integrates several variables, are examples of useful procedures. However, those procedures usually escape classic distinctions between "right" and "wrong" or the fragmentation of scientific bodies. Good and evil, right and wrong, legal and illegal—these are all context-driven. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Director, Scientific Vortex, Inc. - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Crime is Only About The Actions Of Individuals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25495) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-045 — Some Questions Are Just Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle — Ross Anderson > There's a striking parallel with another big problem in science—consciousness. For years, the few first-division academics who dared tackle such problems tended to be near retirement and famous enough to shrug off disapproval; just as Dan Dennett and Nick Humphrey wrote on consciousness, Tony Leggett and Gerard 't Hooft wrote on quantum foundations. So the flame was kept alight. But it's time to bring some tinder. Viennese physicists have now organised two symposia on emergent quantum mechanics, as people finally dare to wrestle with what might be going on down there. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Some Questions Are Just Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25494) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-046 — "Science" — Ian Bogost > We need not choose between God and man, science and philosophy, interpretation and evidence. But ironically, in its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology. Science is not a practice so much as it is an ideology. We don’t need to destroy science in order to bring it down to earth. But we do need to bring it down to earth again, and the first step in doing so is to abandon the rhetoric of science that has become its most popular devotional practice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology; Founding Partner, Persuasive Games LLC; Contributing Editor, The Atlantic - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** ["Science"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25493) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-047 — Statistical Independence — Bart Kosko > The world is massively interconnected through causal chains. Gravity alone causally connects all objects with mass. The world is even more massively correlated with itself. It is a truism that statistical correlation does not imply causality. But it is a mathematical fact that statistical independence implies no correlation at all. None. Yet events routinely correlate with one another. The whole focus of most big-data algorithms is to uncover just such correlations in ever larger data sets. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Statistical Independence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25492) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-048 — Aesthetic Motivation — Sarah Demers > Experimentalists, myself included, have been chasing aesthetically motivated, or partially aesthetically motivated, theories through the data. With a few years of running the Large Hadron Collider at the energy frontier and a host of careful measurements in particle, nuclear and atomic physics carried out all over the globe, large regions of "new physics" parameter space have been recently excluded. Theorists have answered with pivots and extensions, adapting their proposed models in ways that push us to more challenging experimental conditions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics, Yale University - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Aesthetic Motivation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25490) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-049 — Left-Brain/Right-Brain — Sarah-Jayne Blakemore > Some people have proposed that education currently favours left-brain modes of thinking, which are supposed to be logical, analytical and accurate, while not putting enough emphasis on right-brain modes of thinking, which are supposed to be creative, intuitive, emotional and subjective. Certainly education should involve a wide variety of tasks, skills, learning and modes of thinking. However, it is just a metaphor to refer to these as right-brain or left-brain modes. Patients who have had a lesion in their right hemisphere are not devoid of creativity. Patients with a damaged left hemisphere might be unable to produce language (which relies on the left hemisphere in over 90% of the population) but can still be analytical. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychology Professor, University of Cambridge; Author, Inventing Ourselves - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Left-Brain/Right-Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25489) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-050 — "The Rocket Scientist" — Victoria Wyatt > At present, though, constructed boundaries pervade our institutions and policy structures, not only our cliches. Examples abound. Universities segment researchers and students into disciplinary compartments with discreet budgetary line items, competing for scarce resources. ("Interdisciplinary" makes a good buzzword, but the paradigm on which our institutions rest militates against it.) The model of nations negotiating as autonomous entities has failed abysmally to address climate change. In my provincial government’s bureaucracy, separate divisions oversee oceans and forests, as if a fatal barrier slices the ecosystem at the tideline. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of History in Art, University of Victoria - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** ["The Rocket Scientist"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25488) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-051 — Continuity of Time — Ernst Pöppel > The brain has indeed developed specific mechanisms to reduce complexity and temporal uncertainty by creating system states (possibly using neuronal oscillations) within which "Newtonian time" does not exist. Within such system states temporally and spatially distributed information can be integrated as experimental evidence shows. These states are "atempora" because the before-and-after relationship of stimuli processed within such states is not defined or definable. This biological trick implies that time does not flow continuously, but it jumps from one atemporal system state to the next. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Continuity of Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25487) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-052 — Opposites Can’t Both Be Right — Eldar Shafir > We typically assume, for example, that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. But recent research on emotion suggests that positive and negative affects should not be thought of as existing on opposite sides of a continuum, and that, in fact, feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. When participants are surveyed immediately after watching certain films, or graduating from college, they are found to feel both profoundly happy and sad. Our emotional experience, it turns out, is a lot like a viscous cup of tea: It can run hot and cold at the same time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Ph.D., Princeton University; Co-author, Scarcity - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Opposites Can’t Both Be Right](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25486) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-053 — Simple Answers — Gavin Schmidt > Yet collectively we keep acting as though there are simple answers. We continually read about the search for the one method that will allow us to cut through the confusion, the one piece of data that tell us the 'truth', or the final experiment that will 'prove' the hypothesis. But almost all scientists will agree that these are fool's errands—that science is method for producing incrementally more useful approximations to reality, not a path to absolute truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Climatologist; Director, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Simple Answers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25484) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-054 — The Self — Bruce Hood > Yet, the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die. It crops up again and again in recent theories of decision-making as an entity with free will that can be depleted. It re-appears as an interpreter in cognitive neuroscience as capable on integrating parallel streams of information arising from separable neural substrates. Even if these appearances of the self are understood to be convenient ways of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes, students of the mind continue to implicitly endorse that there is a decision-maker, an experiencer, a point of origin. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Self](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25483) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-055 — "Our" Intuitions — Stephen J. Stich > Contemporary philosophers call those judgments "intuitions" And in philosophical theorizing, our intuitions are an important source of evidence. If a philosopher's theory comports with our intuition, the theory is supported; if the theory entails the opposite judgment, the theory is challenged. If you have ever taken a philosophy course, you'll likely find this method very familiar. But it's not just a method that philosophers use in the classroom. At a recent colloquium in my department, I sat in the back and counted the appeals to our intuition made by a rising star in the philosophical profession during a 55 minute talk. There were 26—roughly one every two minutes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** ["Our" Intuitions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25482) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-056 — Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder — David M. Buss > Women's evolved standards of male attractiveness are more complex. Masculine features, hypothesized to signal healthy immune functioning in men, are viewed as attractive more by women seeking short-term than long-term mates, more when women are ovulating than when in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle, and more by women higher in mate value, perhaps because of their ability to attract and control such men. Women's judgments of men's attractiveness are more dependent on multiple contexts—cues to social status, the attention structure, positive interactions with babies, being seen with attractive women, and many others. The greater complexity and variability of what women find attractive in men is reflected in another key empirical finding—there is far less consensus among women about which men are attractive than among men about which women are attractive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25481) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-057 — Stationarity — Laurence C. Smith > It had a good run. For more than a century, stationarity has been used to inform countless decisions aimed at the public good. It guides the planning and building codes for places susceptible to wildfires, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. It is used to determine how and where homes may be built, the structural strength of bridges, and how much premium people should pay for their homeowner's insurance policies. Crop yields are forecasted and, in the developed world, insured against catastrophic failures. And as more weather stations and river level gages are built and accumulate ever-longer data records, our abilities to make such calculations get better. This saves lives and a great deal of money. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Stationarity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25480) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-058 — Individuality — Nigel Goldenfeld > You probably already knew that naïve reductionism is often too simplistic. However, there is another point. It's not just that you are composite, something you already knew, but you are in some senses not even human. You have perhaps a hundred trillion bacterial cells in your body, numbering ten times more than your human cells, and containing a hundred times as many genes as your human cells. These bacteria are not just passive occupants of the zoo that is you. They self-organize into communities within your mouth, guts and elsewhere; and these communities—microbiomes—are maintained by varied, dynamic patterns of competition and cooperation between the different bacteria, which allow us to live. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Individuality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25479) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-059 — String Theory — Frank Tipler > There has been a tendency among theoretical physicists, particularly string theorists, to downplay the importance of experimental confirmation in recent years. Many have even claimed that Copernicus was not superior in predictive power over Ptolemy. I myself decided to check this claim, by looking at Tycho's notebooks. I discovered that between 1564 and 1601, Tycho compared Copernicus's predictions and Ptolemy's predictions with his own observations 294 times. As I expected, Copernicus was superior. So Copernicus' theory was confirmed as experimentally superior to Ptolemy long before Galileo. So I have put the Copernicus-was-no-better-than-Ptolemy idea to the (historical) experimental test, and found that it is false: Copernicus Trumps Ptolemy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [String Theory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25478) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-060 — Spacetime — Steve Giddings > The problem with fundamental spacetime is even more strongly hinted at from multiple developing perspectives. Notable among these hints is the physics of black holes, where it appears that evolution that respects quantum principles must violate the classical spacetime dictum that information does not propagate faster than the speed of light. Something is apparently very wrong with the standard spacetime picture. Additional evidence mounts when one considers the large-scale structure of the Universe, given quantum principles and the presence of dark energy. Here ultimately spacetime undergoes strong quantum fluctuations at very long scales, and seems to lose meaning. More hints have come from candidate mathematical approaches to fluctuating spacetime. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Spacetime](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25477) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-061 — Radical Behaviorism — Simon Baron-Cohen > Orcas are highly social. They live in family groups and complex societies comprised of 'clans', each with their own unique vocalization dialect which likely functions to strengthen group identity. They hunt in groups, a sign of their remarkable capacity for social coordination, and both males and females contribute to childcare. Kidnapping one individual orca and placing him or her in captivity not only isolates the animal from their social community, but it reduces their life expectancy, and causes signs of ill-health, such as the frequent collapse of the dorsal fin. The use of Radical Behaviourism towards such animals in captivity is doubly unethical, because of its lack of respect for the animal's real nature. The focus on shaping surface behavior ignores who or what the animal really is. - **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:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Radical Behaviorism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25473) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-062 — Markets Are Bad; Markets Are Good — Michael I. Norton > Taking a step back and remembering what markets are—an aggregation of many individuals—makes it obvious that markets are very unlikely to be good or bad. Replace the word "markets" with another shorthand term for an aggregation of individuals: "groups." We certainly don't view groups as good or bad. Groups are capable of amazing selflessness, generosity, and heroism; they are also capable of selfishness, greed, and cruelty. They are capable of amazing performance (think of Bell Labs); they are also capable of terrible performance (think of the many dysfunctional groups of which you have been a member). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Director of Research, Harvard Business School; Co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Markets Are Bad; Markets Are Good](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25471) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-063 — Left Brain/Right Brain — Stephen M. Kosslyn > First, the idea that each of us relies primarily on one or the other hemisphere is not empirically justifiable. The evidence indicates that each of us uses all of our brain, not primarily one side or the other. The brain is a single, interactive system, with the parts working in concert to accomplish a given task. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Left Brain/Right Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25470) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-064 — The Illusion of Certainty — Mary Catherine Bateson > Most people are not comfortable with the notion that knowledge can be authoritative, can call for decision and action, and yet be subject to constant revision, because they tend to think of knowledge as additive, not recognizing the necessity of reconfiguring in response to new information. It is precisely this characteristic of scientific knowledge that encourages the denial of climate change and makes it so difficult to respond to what we do know in a context where much is still unknown. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emerita, George Mason University; Visiting Scholar, Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College; Author, Composing a Further Life - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Illusion of Certainty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25469) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-065 — Evolution is True — Roger Highfield > Intelligent design and other Creationist critiques have been easily shrugged off and the facts of evolution well established in the laboratory, fossil record, DNA record and computer simulations. If evolutionary biologists are really Seekers of the Truth, they need to focus more on finding the mathematical regularities of biology, following in the giant footsteps of Sewall Wright, JBS Haldane, Ronald Fisher and so on. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Evolution is True](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25468) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-066 — Common Sense — Robert Provine > Behavioral and brain science detects chinks in our synthetic, neurologically generated edifice of reality. Research on sensory illusions indicates that percepts are simply our best estimate of the nature of physical stimuli, not a precise rendering of things and events. The image of our own body is an oddly shaped product of brain function. Memory of things past is also fraught with uncertainty; it is not the reading-out of information from the brain's neurological data bank, but an ongoing construct subject to error and bias. The brain also makes decisions and initiates action before the observer is consciously aware of detecting and responding to stimuli. My own research found that people confabulate narratives to rationalize their laughter, such as "It was funny," or "I was embarrassed," neglecting laughter's involuntary nature and frequent contagiousness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Common Sense](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25467) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-067 — Emotion is Peripheral — Brian Knutson > Emerging physiological, behavioral, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that emotions are proactive as well as reactive. Emotional signals from the brain now yield predictions about choice and mental health symptoms, and may soon guide scientists to specific circuits that confer more precise control over thought and behavior. Thus, the price of continuing to ignore emotion's centrality to mental function could be substantial. By assuming the mind is like a bundle of reflexes, a computer program, or even a self-interested rational actor, we may miss out on significant opportunities to predict and control behavior—both in individuals and groups. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Emotion is Peripheral](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25466) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-068 — Scientists Should Stick to Science — Buddhini Samarasinghe > The scientific method is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a method or procedure...consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses". It is our finest instrument for unearthing the truth. Applied correctly it is blind to and corrects for our inherent biases. Scientists are trained to wield this formidable tool in their quest to understand the universe around us. The truths they uncover can be at odds with our current beliefs; but when the facts (based on evidence and arrived at through rigorous testing) change, minds also need to change. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Molecular Biologist - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scientists Should Stick to Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25464) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-069 — Culture — Laura Betzig > What if the 100,000-odd year-old evidence of human social life—from the arrowheads in South Africa, to the Venus figurines at Dordogne—is the effect of nothing, more or less, but our efforts to become parents? What if the 10,000-odd year-old record of civilization—from the tax accounts at temples in the Near East, to the inscription on a bronze statue in New York Harbor—is the product of nothing, more or less, but our struggle for genetic representation in future generations? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Historian - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25463) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-070 — Scientific Inference Via Statistical Rituals — Gerd Gigerenzer > As a young man, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had a beautiful dream: to discover the calculus that could map every single idea in the world into symbols. Such a universal calculus would put an end to all scholarly bickering—every passionate Edge discussion, for one, could be swiftly resolved by dispassionate calculation. Leibniz optimistically estimated that a few skilled persons should be able to work the whole thing out in five years. Yet nobody, Leibniz included, has yet found that holy grail. - **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:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Scientific Inference Via Statistical Rituals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25462) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-071 — Science Can Maximize Our Happiness — Paul Bloom > Then there are moral concerns. We are often faced with situations in which we have to choose whether to sacrifice our own happiness for the benefit of others. Most of us make such sacrifices for friends and families; some of us do so for strangers. Framed this way, it's a moral problem, not a hedonic one: a perfect hedonist would help others only to the extent that she believed it would increase her own happiness. But now consider that the same trade-offs apply for a single individual, within a single lifespan. Think of your happiness now and ask yourself how much you will give up, not for another person, but for yourself in the future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Science Can Maximize Our Happiness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25461) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-072 — Numbering Nature — Kurt Gray > Just as evolution can create infinite species by expressing a common process in specific environments, so too can the mind create infinite mental species. One can no sooner count emotions or moral concerns than snowflakes or colors. To be sure, there are descriptive similarities and differences across instances, but any groupings are arbitrary and rest heavily on the intuition of researchers. This is why scientists can never agree on the fundamental number of anything; one scientist may divide a mental experience into 3, another 4, and another 5. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Co-author (with Daniel Wegner), The Mind Club - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Numbering Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25460) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-073 — Carbon Footprints — Daniel Goleman > Then there's the motivational problem. Evolution shaped the human brain to help our ancestors survive in an era when the salient threats were predators. Our perceptual system was not tuned to the macro and micro changes that signal threats to the planetary support system. When it comes to these threats we suffer from system blindness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Carbon Footprints](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25459) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-074 — The Neural Correlates of Consciousness — Susan Blackmore > The idea of the NCCs is simple enough and intuitively tempting. If we believe in the 'hard problem of consciousness'—the mystery of how subjective experience arises from (or is created by or generated by) objective events in a brain—then it's easy to imagine that there must be a special place in the brain where this happens. Or if there is no special place then some kind of 'consciousness neuron', or process or pattern or series of connections. We may not have the first clue how any of these objective things could produce subjective experience but if we could identify which of them was responsible (so the thinking goes), then we would be one step closer to solving the mystery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Neural Correlates of Consciousness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-075 — We are Stone Age Thinkers — Alun Anderson > Of course, it is reasonable to assume that those cognitive tools have to fit nicely with how our brain works, just as a physical tool has to fit well in our hands. But as a species we seem to possess remarkable powers to keep building and rebuilding our cognitive tool kit through interaction with others. It is surprising how similar humans and chimpanzees are when they are infants—in skills like numeracy and behavior reading—and yet so different when they are adult. Beyond a certain age, humans are propelled along a different developmental trajectory, in part because they are immensely socially motivated to interact with others, which chimpanzees are not. Evolutionary developmental psychology has thus become a hot research topic, as it will hold the key to the way social processes unfold minds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [We are Stone Age Thinkers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25456) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-076 — Unification — Marcelo Gleiser > The idea of unification is quite old, as old as Western philosophy. Thales, the first pre-Socratic philosopher, already posited that "all is water," thus dreaming up a single material principle to describe all of Nature. Plato proposed elusive geometrical forms as the archetypal structures behind all there is. Math became equated with beauty and beauty with truth. From there, the highest of post-Plato aspirations was to erect a purely mathematical explanation for all there is, the all-encompassing cosmic blueprint, the masterwork of a supreme intelligence. Needless to say, the whole thing was always about our intelligence, even if often blamed on some foggy "Mind of God" metaphor. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Unification](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25455) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-077 — Inclusive Fitness — Martin Nowak > Contrary to what is often claimed there exists no empirical test of inclusive fitness theory; nobody has ever performed an actual inclusive fitness calculation for a real population. Inclusive fitness was originally understood as a crude heuristic that can guide intuition in some cases, but not in general. It is only in recent years that inclusive fitness has been elevated—mostly by mediocre theoreticians—to a religious belief, which is universal, unconstrained and always true. Understanding the limitations of inclusive fitness gives us now the opportunity to develop mathematical descriptions of key phenomena in social evolution. It is time to abandon inclusive fitness and focus on a meaningful interaction between theory and experiment in sociobiology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology and Mathematics, Harvard University; Co-author, SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Inclusive Fitness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25454) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-078 — Quantum Jumps — David Deutsch > Newton was wrong that there is a maximum size of error that competent people can fall into, but right that this particular one is severe. All those versions of it are mistaken for a single reason: they all require information of the requisite kind to appear from nowhere. In reality, the space on the far side of the barrier cannot "know" that an electron, and not a proton or a bison, must appear there, until some physical change, originating at the electron, reaches it. The same holds when it is not a spatial gap but a directly informational one: Political institutions, and biological adaptations, instantiate information—knowledge—about how a complex system can better meet the challenges facing it, and knowledge can be created only by processes of piecemeal variation and selection. And Kuhn's vision cannot explain how science has in fact been delivering knowledge about physical reality at an ever-accelerating rate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Oxford; Author, The Beginning of Infinity; Recipient, Edge Computation Science Prize - **Extract length:** 150 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Quantum Jumps](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25453) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-079 — Science = Big Science — Samuel Arbesman > Though these examples might sound somewhat trivial, in fact, small-scale science can also have a big impact. Peter Mitchell was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in biochemistry conducted at his own small private research institute with only a handful of people. Support for this small lab included funds from his family's money—making Mitchell a modern-day equivalent of the gentleman scientist. Another Nobel Prize was awarded for work on "split brain" patients—those with the connection between their two hemispheres severed—that led to novel insights into the brain's function. Part of this work consisted of experiments that are so simple—though exceedingly clever—that the Nobel Prize website actually has a game just like the original experiments online, where you can play at home. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complexity Scientist; Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital; Author, Overcomplicated - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Science = Big Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25452) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-080 — The Intrinsic Beauty and Elegance Of Mathematics Allows It to Describe Nature. — Gregory Benford > Can multiverses converse with each other? That would be a way of verifying the basis of such theories. Most multiverse models seem to say there is no possible communication between the infinitude of multiverses. Brane theory, though, comes from models where no force law operates between branes, except gravitation. Perhaps someday an instrument like LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, can detect such waves from branes. But is it elegant to shift confirmation onto some far future technology? Sweeping dust under a rug seems inelegant to me. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Intrinsic Beauty and Elegance Of Mathematics Allows It to Describe Nature.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25451) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-081 — Truer Perceptions Are Fitter Perceptions — Donald D. Hoffman > Observation is the empirical foundation of science. The predicates of this foundation, including space, time, physical objects and causality, are a species-specific adaptation, not an insight. Thus this view of perception has implications for fields beyond perceptual science, including physics, neuroscience and the philosophy of science. The old assumption that fitter perceptions are truer perceptions is deeply woven into our conception of science. The funeral of this assumption will not be snubbed with a back-page obituary, but heralded with regime change. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Truer Perceptions Are Fitter Perceptions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25450) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-082 — The Universe — Seth Lloyd > I know. The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years and is likely to survive for another hundred billion years or more. Plus, where would the universe retire to? Florida isn't big enough. But it is time to retire the twenty-five hundred year old scientific idea of the universe as the single volume of space and time that contains everything. Twenty-first century cosmology strongly suggests that what we see in the cosmos—stars, galaxies, space and time since the big bang—does not encompass all of reality. Cosmos, buy the condo. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25449) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-083 — Anti-anecdotalism — Nicholas G. Carr > We live anecdotally, proceeding from birth to death through a series of incidents, but scientists can be quick to dismiss the value of anecdotes. "Anecdotal" has become something of a curse word, at least when applied to research and other explorations of the real. A personal story, in this view, is a distraction or a distortion, something that gets in the way of a broader, statistically rigorous analysis of a large set of observations or a big pile of data. But as this year's Edge question makes clear, the line between the objective and the subjective falls short of the Euclidean ideal. It's negotiable. The empirical, if it's to provide anything like a full picture, needs to make room for both the statistical and the anecdotal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Utopia is Creepy - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Anti-anecdotalism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25448) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-084 — Brain Plasticity — Leo M. Chalupa > Brain plasticity refers to the fact that neurons are capable of changing their structural and functional properties with experience. That seems hardly surprising since every part of the body changes with age. What is special about brain plasticity (but not unique to this organ) is that the changes are mediated by specific events that are in some sense adaptive. The field of brain plasticity primarily derives from the pioneering studies of Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel who showed that depriving one eye of normal visual input during early development resulted in a loss of functional connections of that eye with the visual cortex, while the connections of the eye not deprived of visual input expanded. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Brain Plasticity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25447) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-085 — Cognitive Agency — Thomas Metzinger > Recent studies in the booming research field of Mind Wandering show that we spend roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time zoning out—daydreaming, lost in fantasies, autobiographical planning, inner narratives or depressive rumination. Depending on the study, 30-50% of our waking life is occupied by spontaneously occurring stimulus and task-unrelated thought. Mind Wandering probably has positive aspects too, because it is associated with creativity, careful future planning, or the encoding of long-term memories. But its overall performance costs (for example, in terms of reading comprehension, memory, sustained attention tasks, or working memory) are marked and have been well documented. So have its negative effects on general, subjective well-being. A wandering mind clearly is an unhappy mind, but it may only be part of a more comprehensive process beyond the conscious self’s control or understanding. The sudden loss of inner autonomy—which all of us experience many hundred times every day—seems to be based on a cyclically recurring process in the brain. The ebb and flow of autonomy and meta-awareness might well be a kind of attentional see-sawing between our inner and outer worlds, caused by a constant competition between the brain networks underlying spontaneous subpersonal thinking and goal-oriented cognition. - **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:** 198 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Cognitive Agency](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25446) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-086 — A Science of Language Should Be Concerned Only With 'Competence' — Nick Enfield > The culprit is a bad idea: that a science of language should be concerned only with competence (the mental capacity for producing sentences), and never with performance (what happens when we actually talk). Here is its decidedly dualist reasoning: When the idealized language patterns tucked away in the mind get 'externalized' in communication, they are filtered and shaped by contingencies such as motor constraints, attention and memory limitations, errors of execution, local conventions, and more. As a result, it is argued, performance bears little useful relation to the pre-defined underlying object of study: competence. Students of linguistics have been taught not to waste their time with the worldly facts of performance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney; Author, How We Talk - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [A Science of Language Should Be Concerned Only With 'Competence'](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25444) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-087 — Unbridled Scientific and Technological Optimism — Stuart Pimm > Fantasies of reclaiming extinct species are always seductive. "Real" scientists—those wearing white lab coats—use fancy machines with knobs and digital readouts to save the planet from humanity's excesses. There is none of the messy interactions with people, politics, and economics that characterise my world. There is nothing involving the real-world realities of habitat destruction, of the inherent conflict between growing human populations and wildlife survival. Why worry about endangered species? We can simply keep their DNA and put them back in the wild later. - **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:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Unbridled Scientific and Technological Optimism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25443) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-088 — Unlimited and Eternal Growth — Hans Ulrich Obrist > Binswanger's goal was to investigate the similarities and differences between aesthetic and economic values through an examination of the historical relationship between economics and alchemy, which he made as interesting as it (at first) sounds outlandish. In his 1985 book Money and Magic, he showed how the brash concept of unlimited growth was inherited from the medieval discourse of alchemy, the search for a process that could turn lead into gold. - **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:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Unlimited and Eternal Growth](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25442) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-089 — Scientists Ought to Know Everything Scientifically Knowable — Ed Regis > Then, in the summer of 2013, a year after the Higgs had been discovered at CERN, a group of particle physicists met at Minneapolis to propose a new, 62-mile-long collider that, they said, would allow "the study of indirect effects of new physics on the W and Z bosons, the top quark, and other systems." These proposals just keep coming, like spam, junk mail, or crabgrass. But sooner or later, enough has got to be enough, even in science, which, after all, is not sacrosanct. It's just silly to keep paying—forever, eternally, and in perpetuity—more and more money for less and less knowledge about hypothetical specks of matter that go so far beyond the infinitesimal as to border on sheer nothingness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scientists Ought to Know Everything Scientifically Knowable](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25441) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-090 — Unlimited And Eternal Growth — Unattributed Edge contributor > Binswanger's goal was to investigate the similarities and differences between aesthetic and economic values through an examination of the historical relationship between economics and alchemy, which he made as interesting as it (at first) sounds outlandish. In his 1985 book Money and Magic, he showed how the brash concept of unlimited growth was inherited from the medieval discourse of alchemy, the search for a process that could turn lead into gold. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Unlimited And Eternal Growth](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25439) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-091 — Stationarity — Giulio Boccaletti > Petra's very existence was a testament to how water management could support the development of civilization in the most extreme circumstances. This part of the world—today in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—survives on less than 70 mm of rain a year, much of it concentrated in a few events in the rainy season. The climatology two thousand years ago was similar, yet Petra thrived thanks to a system of rock-cut underground cisterns, terraced slopes, dams, aqueducts, which stored and delivered water from springs and run-off flows. Petra could grow food, provide drinking water, and support a bustling city because of that infrastructure. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy; Author, Water: A Biography - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Stationarity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25438) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-092 — The Average — Nicholas A. Christakis > Part of the reason we've focused so much on the average is that the statistical tools for computing and comparing averages are so much easier and well developed. It is much harder to compare whether the variance of one group is different than the variance of another. But this calls to mind the well-known anecdote of the drunk searching for his keys on his knees under a lamp-post. His friend comes out of the bar and asks, "What are you doing on the ground?" "Searching for my keys," he replies. "Where did you lose them?" the friend asks. "Over there," the drunk says, pointing some distance away, "But the light is better here." - **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:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Average](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25437) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-093 — Knowing is Half the Battle — Laurie R. Santos and Tamar Gendler > The lesson of much contemporary research in judgment and decision-making is that knowledge— at least in the form of our consciously accessible representation of a situation—is rarely the central factor controlling our behavior. The real power of online behavioral control comes not from knowledge, but from things like situation selection, habit formation, and emotion regulation. This is a lesson that therapy has taken to heart, but one that "pure science" continues to neglect. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director, Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center, Yale University | Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, and Chair, Department of Philosophy; Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives, Yale University - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Knowing is Half the Battle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25436) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-094 — Cause and Effect — W. Daniel Hillis > Science is a rich source of powerful explanatory stories. For example, Newton explained how a force causes a mass to accelerate. This gives us a story of how an apple drops from a tree or a planet circles around the Sun. It allows us to decide how hard the rocket engine needs to push to get it to the Moon. Models of causation allow us to design complex machines like factories and computers that have fabulously long chains of causes and effects. They convert inputs into the outputs that we want. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Cause and Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25435) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-095 — Human Evolutionary Exceptionalism — Michael McCullough > Humans are biologically exceptional. We're exceptionally long-lived and exceptionally cooperative with non-kin. We have exceptionally small guts and exceptionally large brains. We have an exceptional communication system and an exceptional ability to learn from other members of our species. Scientists love to study biologically exceptional human traits such as these, and that's a perfectly reasonable research strategy. Human evolutionary exceptionalism, however—the tendency to assume that biologically exceptional human traits come into the world through exceptional processes of biological evolution—is a bad habit we need to break. Human evolutionary exceptionalism has sown misunderstanding in every area it has touched. Here are three examples. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director, Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, University of Miami; Author, The Kindness of Strangers - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Human Evolutionary Exceptionalism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25434) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-096 — Evidence-Based Medicine — Gary Klein > Any enterprise has its limits and boundary conditions, and science is no exception. When the reach of science moves beyond these boundary conditions, when it demands respect and obedience that it hasn't earned, the results can be counter-productive. One example is Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), which is the scientific idea that I think we should retire. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Evidence-Based Medicine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25433) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-097 — There Can Be No Science Of Art — Jonathan Gottschall > Recent years have seen more use of scientific tools and methods in humanities subjects. Neuroscientists can show us what's happening in the brain when we enjoy a song or study a painting. Psychologists are studying the ways novels and TV shows shape our politics and our morality. Evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars are teaming up to explore narrative's Darwinian origins. And other literary scholars are developing a "digital humanities," using algorithms to extract big data from digitized literature. But scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It does not constitute a research program. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Research Fellow, English Department, Washington & Jefferson College; Author, The Storytelling Animal - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [There Can Be No Science Of Art](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25432) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-098 — Human Evolutionary Exceptionalism — Unattributed Edge contributor > Humans are biologically exceptional. We're exceptionally long-lived and exceptionally cooperative with non-kin. We have exceptionally small guts and exceptionally large brains. We have an exceptional communication system and an exceptional ability to learn from other members of our species. Scientists love to study biologically exceptional human traits such as these, and that's a perfectly reasonable research strategy. Human evolutionary exceptionalism, however—the tendency to assume that biologically exceptional human traits come into the world through exceptional processes of biological evolution—is a bad habit we need to break. Human evolutionary exceptionalism has sown misunderstanding in every area it has touched. Here are three examples. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Human Evolutionary Exceptionalism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25431) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-099 — There Can Be No Science Of Art — Unattributed Edge contributor > Recent years have seen more use of scientific tools and methods in humanities subjects. Neuroscientists can show us what's happening in the brain when we enjoy a song or study a painting. Psychologists are studying the ways novels and TV shows shape our politics and our morality. Evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars are teaming up to explore narrative's Darwinian origins. And other literary scholars are developing a "digital humanities," using algorithms to extract big data from digitized literature. But scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It does not constitute a research program. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [There Can Be No Science Of Art](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25430) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-100 — Mouse Models — Azra Raza, M.D. > An obvious truth, which is either being ignored or going unaddressed in cancer research, is that mouse models do not mimic human disease well and are essentially worthless for drug development. We cured acute leukemia in mice in 1977 with drugs that we are still using in exactly the same dosage and duration today in humans—with dreadful results. Imagine the artificiality of taking human tumor cells, growing them in lab dishes, then transferring them to mice whose immune systems have been compromised so they cannot reject the implanted tumors, and then exposing these "xenografts" to drugs whose killing efficiency and toxicity profiles will then be applied to treat human cancers. The inherent pitfalls of such an entirely synthesized unnatural model system have also plagued other disciplines. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center; Author, The First Cell - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Mouse Models](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25429) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-101 — Max Planck's Faith — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > Note that in the quote in this year's Edge Question, Max Planck speaks of scientific truths "triumphing". Truths don't triumph, the people who propose them do. What needs to be retired is the faith that what scientists say are objective truths, with a reality independent of scientific claims. Some are indeed true, but others depend on so many initial conditions that they straddle the boundary between reality and fiction. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Max Planck's Faith](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25428) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-102 — The Rational Individual — Alex "Sandy" Pentland > By mathematically modeling the social learning and social pressure between people my colleagues and I have been able to accurately model and predict crowd phenomena such as this cascade of mortgage defaulting. Importantly, we have also found that it is possible to shape real-world crowd behaviors by using social network incentives that alter the connections between people, and that these social incentives are much more effective than standard individual economic incentives. In one particularly striking example we were able to use social network incentives to deflate a 'groupthink' bubble among foreign exchange traders and consequently double the return on investment of the individual traders. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, MIT; Director, MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs; Author, Social Physics - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Rational Individual](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25426) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-103 — The Tragedy Of The Commons — Luca De Biase > The tragedy of the commons is at an end, thanks to the writings of the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. But the well-deserved funeral has not been celebrated, yet. Thus, some consequences of the now disproved theory proposed by Garrett Hardin in his famous 1968 article are still to be fully digested. Which is urgent, because some major problems we face in our age are very much related to the commons: climate change, the issue of privacy and freedom on the Internet, the choice between copyright or public domain in scientific knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Editor, Nova 24, of Il Sole 24 Ore - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Tragedy Of The Commons](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25425) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-104 — Science Progresses Most Efficiently By Allocating Funds Via Peer Review — Aubrey de Grey > From top to bottom of the profession, scientists are forsaking their chosen vocation in greater numbers than ever before, in favour of a more dependable and less stressful source of income. What is the basis of this stress and uncertainty, which so severely depletes the ranks of that indispensable community who seek to further humanity's understanding of nature, and thereby our ability to manipulate nature for the greater good? At the sharp end, it is the members of those ranks—scientists themselves—via the convention of apportioning funding by peer review of grant applications. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science Progresses Most Efficiently By Allocating Funds Via Peer Review](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25424) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-105 — Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > Perhaps the old demarcation problem of distinguishing the scientific is misguided. The more important demarcation is distinguishing all that is implicated in and reconcilable with the scientific claims of knowledge. This leads me to hazard a more utopian answer to this year's Edge Question than the one I proposed in the title. What idea should science retire? The idea of "science" itself. Let's retire it in favor of the more inclusive "knowledge." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25423) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-106 — IQ — Scott Atran > There is no reason to believe, and much reason not to believe, that the measure of a so-called "Intelligence Quotient" in any way reflects some basic cognitive capacity, or "natural kind" of the human mind. The domain-general measure of IQ is not motivated by any recent discovery of cognitive or developmental psychology. It thoroughly confounds domain-specific abilities—distinct mental capacities for, say, geometrical and spatial reasoning about shapes and positions, mechanical reasoning about mass and motion, taxonomic reasoning about biological kinds, social reasoning about other people's beliefs and desires, and so on—which are the only sorts of cognitive abilities for which an evolutionary account seems plausible in terms of natural selection for task-specific competencies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Emeritus Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford; Author, Talking to the Enemy - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [IQ](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25422) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-107 — Robot Companions — Sherry Turkle > For a long time, putting hope in artificial intelligence or robots has expressed an enduring technological optimism, a belief that as things go wrong, science will go right. In a complicated world, robots have always seemed like calling in the cavalry. Robots save lives in war zones; in operating rooms; they can function in deep space, in the desert, in the sea, wherever the human body would be in danger. But in the pursuit of artificial companionship, we are not looking for the feats of the cavalry but the benefits of simple salvations. - **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:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Robot Companions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25420) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-108 — Brain Modules — Patricia S. Churchland > The concept of ‘module’ in neuroscience (meaning sufficient for a function, given gas-in-the-tank background conditions) invariably causes more confusion than clarity. The problem is that any neuronal business of any significant complexity is underpinned by spatially distributed networks, and not just incidentally but essentially—and not just cortically, but between cortical and subcortical networks. This is true, for example, of motion perception and pattern recognition, as well as motor control and reinforcement learning, not to mention feelings such as mustering courage to face a threat or deciding to hide instead of run. It is true of self-control and moral judgment. It is likely to be true of conscious experience. The output of a network can vary as the activity of the network’s individual neurons varies. What is poorly understood is how nervous systems solve the coordination problem; i.e. how does the brain orchestrate the right pattern of neuronal activation across networks to get the job done? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher and Neuroscientist; Author, Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition - **Extract length:** 155 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Brain Modules](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25419) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-109 — The "Naturalness" Argument — Peter Woit > For anyone currently thinking about fundamental physics, this latest Edge question is easy, with an obvious answer: string theory. The idea of unifying physics by positing strings moving in ten space-time dimensions as fundamental entities was born in 1974, and became the dominant paradigm for unification from 1984 on. After 40 years of research and literally tens of thousands of papers, what we've learned is that this is an empty idea. It predicts nothing about anything, since one can get pretty much any physics one wants by appropriately choosing how to to make six of the ten dimensions invisible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematical Physicist, Columbia University; Author, Not Even Wrong - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The "Naturalness" Argument](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25416) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-110 — The Clinician's Law of Parsimony — Gerald Smallberg > With the complexity, inconsistency, ambiguity and ultimate uncertainty that define our reality, we should not limit ourselves to using only one or the other of these valuable tools of analysis. We need to be more willing to have our own positions challenged, striving to keep an open mind to other arguments, other viewpoints and conflicting data. In order to make the best decisions for the best reasons, we must choose the appropriate heuristics coupled with intellectual honesty to guide our thinking as we grapple with the cunning machinations of the world we inhabit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Practicing Neurologist, New York City; Playwright, Off-Off Broadway Productions, Charter Members; The Gold Ring - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Clinician's Law of Parsimony](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25415) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-111 — Statistical Significance — Charles Seife > In the best-case scenario, when statistical significance is calculated correctly, it doesn't tell you much. Sure, chance alone is (relatively) unlikely to be responsible for your observation. But it doesn't reveal anything about whether the protocol was set up correctly, whether a machine's calibration was off, whether a computer code was buggy, whether the experimenter properly blinded the data to prevent bias, whether the scientists truly understood all the possible sources of false signals, whether the glassware was properly sterilized, and so forth and so on. When an experiment fails, it's more than likely that the blame doesn't rest on randomness—on statistical flukes—but instead on a good old-fashioned screwup somewhere. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Statistical Significance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25414) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-112 — Cartesian Hydrolicism — Robert Kurzban > Given how wrong Descartes was about how the mind works, it's pretty clear that this sort of idea just can't be right. There have recently been a number of experimental results that disconfirm predictions made by the model, but that's not why the idea should be abandoned. Or, at least, the data aren't the best reason the idea should be abandoned. The reason the idea should be left to die is the same reason that Descartes' idea should be: Although the mind might not work just like a digital computer—no doubt the mind is different from your basic PC in any number of important ways –we do know that computation of some sort is much, much more likely to be a good explanation for human behavior than hydraulics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Cartesian Hydrolicism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25411) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-113 — Economic Growth — César Hidalgo > Yet economic growth, as a concept and a reality, is recent. Modern measures of economic growth are less than a century old, dating back to the invention of GDP by Simon Kuznets in the 1930's. Also, economists mostly agree that economies did not grow before the 19th century, so economic growth—as a phenomenon—is also recent. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab; Author, Why Information Grows - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Economic Growth](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25410) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-114 — Repression — David G. Myers > Actually, say today's memory researchers, there is little evidence of such repression, and much evidence of its opposite. Traumatic experiences (even witnessing a loved one's murder, being terrorized by a hijacker or a rapist, losing everything in a natural disaster) rarely get banished into the unconscious, like a ghost in a closet. Traumas more commonly get etched on the mind as persistent, haunting memories. Moreover, extreme stress and its associated hormones enhance memory, producing unwanted flashbacks that plague survivors. "You see the babies," said one Holocaust survivor. "You see the screaming mothers. . . . It's something you don't forget." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Repression](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25408) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-115 — Artificial Intelligence — Roger Schank > David Deutsch, a physicist at Oxford said: "No brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do. The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of 'artificial intelligence' has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence." He adds that he thinks machines that think like people will happen some day. - **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:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Artificial Intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25406) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-116 — Theories of Anything — Paul J. Steinhardt > A pervasive idea in fundamental physics and cosmology that should be retired: the notion that we live in a multiverse in which the laws of physics and the properties of the cosmos vary randomly from one patch of space to another. According to this view, the laws and properties within our observable universe cannot be explained or predicted because they are set by chance. Different regions of space too distant to ever be observed have different laws and properties, according to this picture. Over the entire multiverse, there are infinitely many distinct patches. Among these patches, in the words of Alan Guth, "anything that can happen will happen—and it will happen infinitely many times." Hence, I refer to this concept as a Theory of Anything. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Theories of Anything](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25405) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-117 — Human Nature — Peter Richerson > In his Sketch on an infant Darwin described how readily children learn from their caregivers. The inheritance of traditions, customs, and language is relatively easy to observe with the tools of a 19th Century naturalist compared to intricacies of genetic inheritance, which is still yielding fundamental secrets to the high tech tools of molecular biology. Recent work on the mechanisms underlying imitation and teaching has begun to reveal the more deeply hidden cognitive components of these processes and the results underpin Darwin's phenomenological account of tradition acquisition and evolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California-Davis; Visiting Professor, Institute of Archaeology, University College London - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Human Nature](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25404) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-118 — "Addiction" — Helen Fisher > Nobel laureate Eric Kandel recently said, "Brain studies will ultimately tell us what it is like to be human." Knowing what we now know about the brain, my brain-scanning partner, Lucy Brown, has suggested that romantic love is a natural addiction; and I have maintained that this natural addiction evolved from mammalian antecedents some 4.4 million years ago among our first hominid ancestors, in conjunction with the evolution of (serial, social) monogamy—a hallmark of humankind. Its purpose: to motivate our forebears to focus their mating time and metabolic energy on a single partner at a time, thus initiating the formation of a pair-bond to rear their young (at least through infancy) together as a team. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** ["Addiction"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25403) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-119 — The Distinction Between Antisociality And Mental Illness — Abigail Marsh > The United States is an unusually individualistic country, which may help to explain its unusually strong adherence to the norm of self-interest, and also perhaps its unusually punitive (rather than treatment-focused) approach to crime and aggression. This approach can be contrasted with that of, for example, the relatively less individualistic Scandinavian nations where treatment rather than punishment of even serious criminal offenders is emphasized. Mental health-focused approaches may reduce recidivism, further supporting the possibility that externalizing behaviors, including crime and aggression, may be most effectively considered symptoms of psychopathology in need of treatment rather than simple failures of impulse control in need of punishment—that the distinction between antisociality and mental illness should be abandoned. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Georgetown University - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Distinction Between Antisociality And Mental Illness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25402) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-120 — Standard Deviation — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good—particularly with the growing class of people in social science mechanistically applying statistical tools to scientific problems. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Standard Deviation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25401) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-121 — Essentialist Views of the Mind — Lisa Feldman Barrett > Some topics in psychology have advanced beyond essentialist views. Memory, for example, was once thought to be a single process, and later was split into distinct subtypes like semantic memory and episodic memory. Memories are now considered to be constructed within the brain's functional architecture and not to reside in specific brain tissue. One hopes that other areas of psychology and neuroscience will soon follow suit. For example, cognition and emotion are still considered separate processes in the mind and brain, but there is growing evidence that the brain does not respect this division. This means every psychological theory in which emotions and cognitions battle each other, or in which cognitions regulate emotions, is wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University; Research Neuroscientist, Massachusetts General Hospital; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Author, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Essentialist Views of the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25400) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/The Brain Does Not Separate Cognition From Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett|The Brain Does Not Separate Cognition From Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett]] ### EDGE2014-122 — Essentialist Views of the Mind — Unattributed Edge contributor > Some topics in psychology have advanced beyond essentialist views. Memory, for example, was once thought to be a single process, and later was split into distinct subtypes like semantic memory and episodic memory. Memories are now considered to be constructed within the brain's functional architecture and not to reside in specific brain tissue. One hopes that other areas of psychology and neuroscience will soon follow suit. For example, cognition and emotion are still considered separate processes in the mind and brain, but there is growing evidence that the brain does not respect this division. This means every psychological theory in which emotions and cognitions battle each other, or in which cognitions regulate emotions, is wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Essentialist Views of the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25399) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/The Brain Does Not Separate Cognition From Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett|The Brain Does Not Separate Cognition From Emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett]] ### EDGE2014-123 — The Scientific Method — Melanie Swan > The scientific idea that is most ready for retirement is the scientific method itself. More precisely it is the idea that there would be only one scientific method, one exclusive way of obtaining scientific results. The problem is that the traditional scientific method as an exclusive approach is not adequate to the new situations of contemporary science like big data, crowdsourcing, and synthetic biology. Hypothesis-testing through observation, measurement, and experimentation made sense in the past when obtaining information was scarce and costly, but this is no longer the case. In recent decades, we have already been adapting to a new era of information abundance that has facilitated experimental design and iteration. One result is that there is now a field of computational science alongside nearly every discipline, for example computational biology and digital manuscript archiving. Information abundance and computational advance has promulgated the evolution of a scientific model that is distinct from the traditional scientific method, and three emerging areas are advancing it even more. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosophy and Economic Theory, the New School for Social Research - **Extract length:** 165 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Scientific Method](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25398) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-124 — Humaniqueness — Irene Pepperberg > All told, it seems to me that it is time to continue to study all the complexities of behavior in all species, human and nonhuman, to concentrate on similarities as well as differences, and—in many cases—to appreciate the inspiration that our nonhuman compatriots provide in order to develop tools and skills that enhance our own abilities, rather than simply to consign nonhumans to a second-class status. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Humaniqueness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25397) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-125 — Human Being=Homo Sapiens — Steve Fuller > It is not too early to construct Turing Test 2.0 tests of 'human citizenship' that attempt to capture the full complexity of the sorts of beings that we would have live among us as equals. A good place to start would be with a sympathetic rendering of long-standing—and too easily dismissed—'anthropomorphic' attributions to animals and machines. Welfare State 2.0 policies could be then designed to enable a wide assortment of candidate beings—from carbon to silicon—to meet the requisite standard of citizenship implied in such attributions. Indeed, many classic welfare state policies such as compulsory mass education and childhood vaccination can be understood retrospectively as the original political commitment to 'uplift' in Brin's sense—but applied only to members of Homo sapiens living within the territory governed by a nation-state. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick; Author, The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Human Being=Homo Sapiens](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25396) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-126 — Humans Are By Nature Social Animals — Adam Waytz > For reinforcing a perilous social psychological imperialism toward other behavioral sciences and for suggesting that humans are naturally oriented toward others, the strong interpretation of Aristotle's famous aphorism needs to be retired. Certainly sociality is a dominant force that shapes thought, behavior, physiology, and neural activity. However, enthusiasm over the social brain, social hormones, and social cognition must be tempered with evidence that being social is far from easy, automatic, or infinite. This is because our (social) brains, (social) hormones, and (social) cognition on which social processes rely must first be triggered before they do anything for us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Author, The Power of Human - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Humans Are By Nature Social Animals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25395) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-127 — The Input-Output Model of Perception and Action — Andy Clark > Just about every aspect of the passive input-output model is thus false. We are not cognitive couch potatoes so much as proactive predictavores, forever trying to stay one step ahead of the incoming waves of sensory stimulation. Keeping this in mind will help us to design better experiments, build better robots, and appreciate the deep continuities binding life and mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Input-Output Model of Perception and Action](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25394) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-128 — Our World Has Only Three Space Dimensions — Gordon Kane > A nice example of how the string theories may help comes from the Higgs boson mass. In the Standard Model the Higgs boson mass cannot be predicted at all. The extension of the Standard Model to the theory called the supersymmetric Standard Model predicts an upper limit on the Higgs boson mass, but cannot make an accurate prediction of the mass. Compactified M-theory allows a prediction (made by me with students and colleagues) with an accuracy of a few per cent, in 2011 before the CERN measurements, and confirmed by subsequent data. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Particle Physicist and Cosmologist; Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan; Author, Supersymmetry and Beyond - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Our World Has Only Three Space Dimensions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25393) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-129 — The Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Radiation Dose Hypothesis — Stewart Brand > At stake is the hundreds of billions spent on meaningless levels of "safety" around nuclear power plants and waste storage, the projected costs of next-generation nuclear plant designs to reduce greenhouse gases worldwide, and the extremely harmful episodes of public panic that accompany rare radiation-release events like Fukushima and Chernobyl. (No birth defects whatever were caused by Chernobyl, but fear of them led to 100,000 panic abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe. What people remember about Fukushima is that nuclear opponents predicted that hundreds or thousands would die or become ill from the radiation. In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Radiation Dose Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25392) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-130 — Anthropocentricity — Satyajit Das > Science, paradoxically, seems to also have inbuilt limits. Like an inexhaustible Russian doll, quantum physics is an endless succession of seemingly infinitely divisible particles. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle posits that human knowledge about the world is always incomplete, uncertain and highly contingent. Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems of arithmetic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former Financier; Author, Age of Stagnation - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Anthropocentricity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25391) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-131 — Culture — Pascal Boyer > Second, if you believe in culture as a thing, it seems normal to you that culture should be the same across individuals and across generations. So you treat as unproblematic precisely the phenomenon that is vastly improbable and deserves a special explanation. Human communication does not proceed by direct transfer of mental representations from one brain to another. It consists in inferences from other people's behaviors and utterances, which rarely if ever leads to the replication of ideas. That such processes could lead to roughly stable representations across large numbers of people is a wonderful, anti-entropic process that cries out for explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist and Psychologist, Washington University in St. Louis; Author, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25388) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-132 — Multiple Regression as a Means of Discovering Causality — Richard Nisbett > Even when there is an attempt to control for all possible variables, they are not necessarily well-measured, which means that their contribution to the target dependent variable will be underestimated. For example, there is no unique correct way to measure social class. Education level, income, wealth, and occupational level are all pieces of the pie and there is no canonical way to weight them to come up the same social-class value that God has in mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Multiple Regression as a Means of Discovering Causality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25387) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-133 — Science Advances By Funerals — Samuel Barondes > With his back against the wall, the 42-year-old Planck quickly thought up an alternative equation that fit the data. But the new equation also had a disruptive effect. Being hard to reconcile with traditional ideas, it turned out to be an initial building block for a completely new view of physics called quantum theory. The resistance to this disruption by conservative members of the physics community may have been what led to Planck's petulant claim that a new scientific truth will not triumph "until its opponents eventually die." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science Advances By Funerals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25386) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-134 — Free Will — Jerry A. Coyne > The first is from scientific experience, which shows no evidence for a mind separate from the physical brain. This means that "I"—whatever "I" means—may have the illusion of choosing, but my choices are in principle predictable by the laws of physics, excepting any quantum indeterminacy that acts in my neurons. In short, the traditional notion of free will—defined by Anthony Cashmore as "a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature"—is dead on arrival. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author, Why Evolution is True; Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Free Will](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25381) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-135 — Somatic Mutation Theory of Cancer — Paul Davies > Cancer cells acquire a range of distinctive hallmarks—unfettered proliferation, evasion of apoptosis, motility and migratory powers, genomic rearrangements, epigenetic alterations, and changes in the mode of metabolism, chromatin architecture and elasticity (to mention a few)—that collectively confer remarkable robustness and survivability. In the standard picture, cancer, with all these attendant hallmarks, is considered to be re-invented de novo in each host organism: the result of a dream run of "lucky" genetic accidents. The gain of all these amazing fitness functions, co-located in the same neoplasm (population of new cells), over a period of as little as months or even weeks, is attributed to a sort of ultra-fast-paced Darwinian evolution going on in the body of the host organism. Unfortunately this theory, despite its simplicity and popular appeal, has only one successful prediction: that the administration of chemotherapeutic drugs is very likely to fail on account of the neoplasm's ability to rapidly evolve a resistant sub-population. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot - **Extract length:** 155 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Somatic Mutation Theory of Cancer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25380) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-136 — Things Are Either True Or False — Alan Alda > For me, the trouble with truth is that not only is the notion of eternal, universal truth highly questionable, but simple, local truths are subject to refinement as well. Up is up and down is down, of course. Except under special circumstances. Is the North Pole up and the South Pole down? Is someone standing at one of the poles right-side up or upside-down? Kind of depends on your perspective. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Things Are Either True Or False](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25379) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-137 — The Standard Approach To Meaning — Dan Sperber > Most of the time, semanticists start from the dogma I have just criticized. They provide elaborate, often formal analyses of linguistic meanings that match the contents of our conscious thoughts. Are linguistic meanings really like this? Only a minority of researchers is exploring the idea that they might be a very different kind of mental objects. Unlike beliefs and intentions, linguistic 'meanings' may be just as inaccessible to untutored consciousness as are syntactic properties. They must, on the other hand, be the right kind of objects to serve as input to the unconscious inferences that achieve comprehension. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Standard Approach To Meaning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25378) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-138 — Computer Science — Neil Gershenfeld > In nature, everything happens everywhere all the time. While an industry has developed devices for computation, a much smaller community has studied the physics of computation. Outside of what is traditionally considered to be computer science, they've developed quantum computers that use entanglement and superposition, microfluidic logic that transports material as well as information, analog logic that solves digital problems with continuous device degrees of freedom, and digital fabrication to code construction of programmable materials. Most importantly, programming models are emerging that represent and respect physical resources, rather than viewing them as a can to be kicked to someone else to worry about. It's turning out that this is easier rather than harder to do, because it avoids all of the issues of converting from an unphysical to a physical world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Computer Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25377) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-139 — A Standard Dogma About Meaning — Unattributed Edge contributor > Most of the time, semanticists start from the dogma I have just criticized. They provide elaborate, often formal analyses of linguistic meanings that match the contents of our conscious thoughts. Are linguistic meanings really like this? Only a minority of researchers is exploring the idea that they might be a very different kind of mental objects. Unlike beliefs and intentions, linguistic 'meanings' may be just as inaccessible to untutored consciousness as are syntactic properties. They must, on the other hand, be the right kind of objects to serve as input to the unconscious inferences that achieve comprehension. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [A Standard Dogma About Meaning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25376) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-140 — The Laws of Physics Are Predetermined — Lawrence M. Krauss > Focusing on anthropics misses the point in any case. The important fact is that we must be willing to give up the idea that the laws of physics in our universe reflect some underlying fundamental order… that the laws are somehow pre-ordained by principles of beauty or symmetry. There is nothing new about this. It was myopic to assume that life on our planet was pre-ordained. We now understand that accidents of natural selection and environmental traumas governed the history of life that led to our existence. It is equally myopic to assume that we are somehow the pinnacles of evolution—that all roads lead to us, or that we will not lead to something completely different in the future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Laws of Physics Are Predetermined](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25375) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-141 — Malthusianism — Matt Ridley > World population will almost certainly cease to grow before the end of the century; peak farmland is very close if not already past; electric cars driven by nuclear power stations are to all intents and purposes an infinite resource. The world is a dynamic, reflexive place in which change is all. Time to retire the static mistakes of misanthropic, myopic, mathematical Parson Malthus because he never was and never will be right. - **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:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Malthusianism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25374) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-142 — Simplicity — A. C. Grayling > Of course it would be nice if everything in the end turned out to be simple, or could be made amenable to simple description. But some things might be better or more adequately explained in their complexity—biological systems again come to mind. Resisting too dissipative a form of reductionism there might ward off those silly kinds of criticism claiming that science aims to see nothing in the pearl but the disease of the oyster. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Master of the New College of the Humanities; Supernumerary Fellow, St Anne's College, Oxford; Author, War: An Enquiry - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Simplicity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25373) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-143 — Our Narrow Definition of "Science" — Sam Harris > The scientific attitude can handle whatever happens to be the case. Indeed, if the evidence for the inerrancy of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus Christ were good, one could embrace the doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity scientifically. The problem, of course, is that the evidence is either terrible or nonexistent—hence the partition we have erected (in practice, never in principle) between science and religion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Our Narrow Definition of "Science"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25372) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-144 — The Big Bang Was The First Moment Of Time — Lee Smolin > During the Twentieth Century we learned a great deal about the first three minutes of our expanding universe (in Steven Weinberg's phrase). During this century we can look forward to gaining scientific evidence of the last three minutes of the era before ours, and learning how physics before the big bang gave rise to the birth of our universe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Big Bang Was The First Moment Of Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25371) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-145 — Essentialism — Richard Dawkins > Moral controversies such as those over abortion and euthanasia are riddled with the same infection. At what point is a brain-dead accident-victim defined as "dead"? At what moment during development does an embryo become a "person"? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there’s no one instant when "personhood" should be deemed to have arrived. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail, "But there has to be some moment when the fetus becomes human." No, there really doesn’t, any more than there has to be a day when a middle aged person becomes old. It would be better—though still not ideal—to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three quarters human . . . The essentialist mind will recoil from such language and accuse me of all manner of horrors for denying the essence of humanness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 163 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Essentialism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25366) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-146 — Nature Versus Nurture — Timo Hannay > Of course, the experts already know this. They realise, for example, that most children inherit from their parents not only genes but also their environment. Hence studies of separated monozygotic twins (who share most of their genes but not their environments). In addition, the idea of the extended phenotype—in which organisms, driven by their genes, act to modify their environments—has been well understood for over 30 years. And the science of epigenetics, though still very much in progress, has already demonstrated a wide variety of ways in which a gene's effects can be altered by factors other than its nucleotide sequence, and shown that these are determined in large part by the gene's environment (which, of course, consists in part of other genes, both in the same organism and beyond). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Managing Director, SchoolDash; Co-organizer, Sci Foo Camp - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Nature Versus Nurture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25365) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-147 — Timo Hannay — Unattributed Edge contributor > Of course, the experts already know this. They realise, for example, that most children inherit from their parents not only genes but also their environment. Hence studies of separated monozygotic twins (who share most of their genes but not their environments). In addition, the idea of the extended phenotype—in which organisms, driven by their genes, act to modify their environments—has been well understood for over 30 years. And the science of epigenetics, though still very much in progress, has already demonstrated a wide variety of ways in which a gene's effects can be altered by factors other than its nucleotide sequence, and shown that these are determined in large part by the gene's environment (which, of course, consists in part of other genes, both in the same organism and beyond). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Timo Hannay](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25364) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-148 — One Genome Per Individual — Eric Topol > The implications are potentially big. When we do use a blood sample to evaluate a person's genome, we have no clue about the potential mosaicism that exists throughout the individual's body. So a lot more work needs to be done to sort this out, and now that we have the technology to do it, we'll undoubtedly better understand our remarkable heterogeneous genomic selves in the years ahead. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [One Genome Per Individual](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25363) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-149 — [Questioning the Question:] Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! — Ian McEwan > Every last serious and systematic speculation about the world deserves to be preserved. We need to remember how we got to where we are, and we'd like the future not to retire us. Science should look to literature and maintain a vibrant living history as a monument to ingenuity and persistence. We won't retire Shakespeare. Nor should we Bacon. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Novelist; Recipient, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Author, Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; The Cockroach - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [[Questioning the Question:] Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25362) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-150 — Innateness — Alison Gopnik > The increasingly influential Bayesian models of human learning, models that have come to dominate recent accounts of human cognition, also challenge the idea of innateness in a different way. At least since Chomsky, there have been debates about whether we have innate knowledge. The Bayesian picture characterizes knowledge in terms of a set of potential hypotheses about the world. We initially believe that some hypotheses are less probable and others are more so. As we collect new evidence we can rationally update the probability of these hypotheses. We can discard what initially looked very likely and eventually accepting ideas that started out as longshots. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Innateness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25360) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-151 — Replication As a Safety Net — Adam Alter > In 1984, New York became the first state to introduce mandatory seat belt laws. Most of the remaining states applauded the new legislation and followed suit in the 1980s and 1990s, but a small collection of researchers worried that seat belts might paradoxically license people to drive more carelessly. They believed that people drove carefully because they worried they might be seriously injured in an accident; if seat belts diminished the risk of serious injury, they would also diminish the incentive to drive carefully. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author, Irresistible - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Replication As a Safety Net](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25357) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-152 — Languages Conditioning Worldviews — John McWhorter > Who wants to go there? Especially when even starting to, decade after decade, leads us down blind alleys? Hopi, it turned out, has plenty of markers of good old-fashioned European-style time. Or, Yale economist Keith Chen's recent idea that not having a future tense makes a language's speaker more thrifty—pause to wrap your head around that: it's not having a future that makes you save money!—has intrigued the media for years now. But if four Slavic languages like Russian and Polish all do not have a future tense, and yet savings rates among their countries are vastly different, then the whole idea is out the window. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Languages Conditioning Worldviews](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25356) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-153 — The Collapse Of The Wave-Function — Freeman Dyson > Unfortunately, people writing about quantum mechanics often use the phrase "collapse of the wave-function" to describe what happens when an object is observed. This phrase gives a misleading idea that the wave-function itself is a physical object. A physical object can collapse when it bumps into an obstacle. But a wave-function cannot be a physical object. A wave-function is a description of a probability, and a probability is a statement of ignorance. Ignorance is not a physical object, and neither is a wave-function. When new knowledge displaces ignorance, the wave-function does not collapse; it merely becomes irrelevant. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Collapse Of The Wave-Function](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25350) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-154 — The Power of Statistics — Emanuel Derman > Science is a battle to find causes and explanations amidst the confusion of data. Let us not get too enamored of data science, whose great triumphs so far are mainly in advertising and persuasion. Data alone has no voice. There is no "raw" data, as Kepler's saga shows. Choosing what data to collect and how to think about it takes insight into the invisible; making good sense of the data collected requires the classic conservative methods: intuition, modeling, theorizing, and then, finally, statistics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Financial Engineering, Columbia University; Author, Models.Behaving.Badly - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Power of Statistics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25349) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-155 — The Discovery of the Higgs particle Closes a Chapter in Particle Physics — Haim Harari > The Higgs particle contributes absolutely nothing to the solution of these puzzles, unless the final answer is that the Higgs particle is indeed God's particle and it is God's will that the particle masses are these and no others. Or, perhaps, it is not one God, but a dozen gods with diverse numerical tastes. The good news is that we still have some exciting discoveries ahead of us, deciphering the basic structure of all of matter, beyond the temporary picture offered by the standard model. We certainly do not yet have a theory of everything, not even close. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Discovery of the Higgs particle Closes a Chapter in Particle Physics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25348) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-156 — [Questioning the Question:] Science's Rainbow Quilt — Jared Diamond > The history of science is much more variegated than assumed in the Edge Question about the abandonment and burial of old ideas. While the view that new ideas triumph by replacing old ones fits some scientific developments, in many other cases new ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new "outlooks." (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term "outlook" is the German word Fragestellung –literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a world view from which that question can arise). I'll give two or three examples illustrating each of those two reasons. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [[Questioning the Question:] Science's Rainbow Quilt](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25347) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-157 — The Pursuit of Parsimony — Jonathan Haidt > William of Ockham was a 14th-century English logician who said that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." That principle—now known as "Occam's Razor"—has been used for centuries by scientists and philosophers as a tool to adjudicate among competing theories. Parsimony means frugality or stinginess, and scientists should be "stingy" when building theories; they should use as little material as possible. If two theories really do exactly as good a job of explaining the empirical evidence, then you should pick the simpler theory. If Copernicus and Ptolemy can both explain the movements of the heavens, including the occasional backwards motion of some planets, then go with Copernicus's far more parsimonious model. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Pursuit of Parsimony](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25346) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-158 — Geometry — Carlo Rovelli > We will continue to use geometry as a useful branch of mathematics, but is time to abandon the longstanding idea of geometry as the description of physical space. The idea that geometry is the description of physical space is engrained in us, and might sound hard to get rid of it, but it is unavoidable; it is just a matter of time. Better get rid of it soon. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Geometry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25345) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-159 — Infinity — Max Tegmark > Not only do we lack evidence for the infinite, but we don't actually need the infinite to do physics: our best computer simulations, accurately describing everything from the formation of galaxies to to tomorrow's weather to the masses of elementary particles, use only finite computer resources by treating everything as finite. So if we can do without infinity to figure out what happens next, surely nature can too—in a way that's more deep and elegant than the hacks we use for our computer simulations. Our challenge as physicists is to discover this elegant way and the infinity-free equations describing it—the true laws of physics. To start this search in earnest, we need to question infinity. I'm betting that we also need to let go of it. - **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:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Infinity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25344) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-160 — Learning And Culture — John Tooby > All "learning" operationally means is that something about the organism's interaction with the environment caused a change in the information states of the brain, by mechanisms unexplained. All "culture" means is that some information states in one person's brain somehow cause, by mechanisms unexplained, "similar" information states to be reconstructed in another's brain. The assumption is that because supposed instances of "culture" (or equally, "learning") are referred to with the same name, they are the same kind of thing. Instead, each masks an enormous array of thoroughly dissimilar things. Attempting to construct a science built around culture (or learning) as a unitary concept is as misguided as attempting to develop a robust science of white things (egg shells, clouds, O-type stars, Pat Boone, human scleras, bones, first generation MacBooks, dandelion sap, lilies…). - **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:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Learning And Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25343) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-161 — The Accumulation Of Relative Yesterdays — Christine Finn > We cherry-pick the past. Time-zone concerns are so over. Blogs are a hoard of content, only as fresh as the day they are retrieved. Archive photos and just-taken selfies get uploaded together onto timelines which run laterally. Half-forgotten news hangs around the Internet, and it surfaces—that old school term again—as new news to the fresh viewer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Accumulation Of Relative Yesterdays](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25342) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-162 — Scientific Morality — Edward Slingerland > Impressed by the growing explanatory power of the natural sciences of his time, the philosopher David Hume called upon his colleagues to abandon the armchair, turn their attention to empirical evidence, and "hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience… [to] reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation." This was over two hundred years ago, and unfortunately not much changed in academic philosophy until about the last decade or two. Pushing past a barrier also associated with Hume—the infamous is-ought or fact-value distinction—a growing number of philosophers have finally begun arguing that our theories should be informed by our best current empirical accounts of how the human minds works, and that an ethical system that posits or requires an impossible psychology should be treated with suspicion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, University of British Columbia; Author, Drunk - **Extract length:** 139 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scientific Morality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25339) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-163 — Reproducibility — Victoria Stodden > The report recommended for the first time that the software associated with a computational test be fixed at the beginning of the approval process, and thereafter made "sustainably available." A subsequent workshop at Brown University on "Reproducibility in Computational and Experimental Mathematics" (of which I was a co-organizer) produced recommendations regarding the appropriate information to include when publishing computational findings, including access to code, data, and implementation details. Reproducibility in this context should be relabeled computational reproducibility. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Reproducibility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25340) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-164 — Mind Versus Matter — Frank Wilczek > More interesting is the question of consequences. Here is a relevant thought experiment: Imagine an artificial intelligence, with human-like insight, contemplating her own blueprint. What would she make of it? I think it's overwhelmingly likely that among her first thoughts would be how to begin making improvements. This processor could be faster, that memory more capacious—and, above all, the reward system more rewarding! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Mind Versus Matter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25285) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-165 — Only *Some* Experiences Affect The Brain — Howard Gardner > When I speak to students or lay audiences about any kind of digital innovation, the first statement or question from the audience takes the form, roughly, "Do smart phones change the brain?" or "We can't let infants play with pads because it might affect their brains." I try to explain that everything that we do affects the nervous system and that the statement is therefore either meaningless or needs to be unpacked. One unpacking would proceed "Does this experience affect the nervous system significantly and perhaps even permanently?" A quite different response: "Do you mean 'affect the mind', or 'affect the brain'?" When the questioner looks blank, I sense that he/she needs a refresher in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Only *Some* Experiences Affect The Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25338) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-166 — Behavior = Genes + Environment — Steven Pinker > Would you say that the behavior of your computer or smartphone is determined by an interaction between its inherent design and the way it is influenced by the environment? It's unlikely—such a statement would not be false, but it would be obtuse. Complex adaptive systems have a nonrandom organization, and they have inputs. But speaking of inputs as "shaping" the system's behavior, or pitting its design against its input, would lead to no insight as to how the system works. The human brain is far more complex, and processes its input in more complex ways, than human-made devices, yet many people analyze it in ways that are too simplistic for our far simpler toys. Every term in the equation is suspect. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Behavior = Genes + Environment](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25337) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-167 — The Computational Metaphor — Rodney A. Brooks > Throughout history we have used technological systems as metaphors to describe how the body and brain might work. Early on, Greek water technology led to the four humors, and that they must be kept in balance. By the eighteenth century both clock mechanisms and flows of fluids were used as metaphors for what happened in the brain, and by the first half of the twentieth century a common metaphor for the brain was a telephone switching network. Indeed, the mathematics that had been developed for signal propagation in telegraph and telephone wires were used to model action potentials in axons. By the sixties, cyberneticians were using models of negative feedback originally developed for the steam engine, and greatly expanded upon during the war of the forties for controlling the aiming of guns, to try develop models for the brain. But these soon ran out of steam, so to speak, and were supplanted in the general consciousness by metaphors of the brain as a digital computer. One started to hear claims of the brain as the hardware, and the mind as the software, a model that really did not end up helping our understanding of either the brain or the mind very much at all. Throughout the later parts of the twentieth century the brain became a massively parallel digital supercomputer, and now one can find claims that the brain and the world wide web are similar in how they work with webpages and neurons playing similar roles, while hyperlinks and synapses map to each other. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 255 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Computational Metaphor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25336) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-168 — The Grand Analogy — David Gelernter > (Those who note that computers-that-can-feel are incredible are sometimes told: "You assert that many billions of tiny, meaningless computer instructions, each unable to feel, could never create a system that feels. Yet neurons are also tiny, "meaningless" and feel nothing--but a hundred billion of those yields a brain that does feel." Which is irrelevant: 100 billion neurons yield a brain that supports a mind, but a hundred billion sandgrains or used tires yields nothing. You need billions of the right article arranged in the right way to get feeling.) - **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:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Grand Analogy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25335) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-169 — Psychogenic Illness — Beatrice Golomb > In other instances, the psychogenic defense rested on cessation of hiccups with sleep. Proof positive. Except for pesky counterexamples a reading of the literature would expose. Like the boy whose recurrent hiccups initially resolved with sleep – but then didn't. And then his medullary brain tumor was diagnosed. (The medulla exerts tonic inhibition to the hiccup reflex; damage disrupts this inhibition.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Medicine at UCSD - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Psychogenic Illness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25334) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-170 — Hard-Wired=Permanent — Michael Shermer > So it has been and will continue to be with other forms of the hard-wired=permanent idea, such as violence. We may be hard-wired for violence, but we can attenuate it considerably through scientifically tested methods. Thus, for my test case here, I predict that in another 500 years the God-theory of causality will have fallen into disuse, and the 21st-century scientific theory that God is hardwired into our brains as a permanent feature of our species will be retired. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Hard-Wired=Permanent](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25333) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-171 — Planck's Cynical View Of Scientific Change — Hugo Mercier > If people who disagree with us are never going to change their mind, then why even talk to them? If we do not engage people who disagree with us in discussion, we will never learn of the—often perfectly good—reasons why they disagree with us. If we cannot address these reasons, then our arguments are likely to prove unconvincing. Our failures to convince will only reinforce the belief that we face pigheadedness rather than rational disagreement. A belief in the inefficiency of argumentation can be a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. We should give scientists, and argumentation more generally, more credit: it is well deserved. Let's retire Planck's cynical view of scientific change. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, French National Center for Scientific Research; Author, Not Born Yesterday - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Planck's Cynical View Of Scientific Change](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25332) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-172 — The Atheism Prerequisite — Douglas Rushkoff > But science's unearned commitment to materialism has led us into convoluted assumptions about the origins of space-time, in which time itself simply must be accepted as a byproduct of the big bang, and consciousness (if it even exists) as a byproduct of matter. Such narratives follow information on its continuing evolution toward complexity, the singularity, and robot consciousness—a saga no less apocalyptic than the most literal interpretations of Biblical prophecy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Atheism Prerequisite](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25331) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-173 — Grandmother Cells — Terrence J. Sejnowski > In 2004 an epilepsy patient at the UCLA Medical Center whose brain was being monitored to detect the origin of the seizures was shown a series of pictures of celebrities. Electrodes implanted into the memory centers of the patient's brain reported spikes in response to the photos. One of the neurons responded vigorously to several pictures of Jennifer Aniston, but not to other famous people. A neuron in another patient would only respond to pictures of Halle Berry, and even to her name, but not to pictures of Bill Clinton or Julia Roberts or the names of other famous people. - **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:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Grandmother Cells](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25325) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-174 — Falsifiability — Sean Carroll > If the universe we see around us is the only one there is, the vacuum energy is a unique constant of nature, and we are faced with the problem of explaining it. If, on the other hand, we live in a multiverse, the vacuum energy could be completely different in different regions, and an explanation suggests itself immediately: in regions where the vacuum energy is much larger, conditions are inhospitable to the existence of life. There is therefore a selection effect, and we should predict a small value of the vacuum energy. Indeed, using this precise reasoning, Steven Weinberg did predict the value of the vacuum energy, long before the acceleration of the universe was discovered. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, Something Deeply Hidden - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Falsifiability](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25322) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-175 — Instinct and Innate — Daniel L. Everett > Another reason for doubting the usefulness of terms like "insinct" and "innate" is that many things that we believe to be instinctual can change radically when the environment changes radically, even aspects of the environment that we might not have thought relevant. For example, in 2004 a group of scientists carried out experiments on rats in a low-gravity environment of earth orbit. What they discovered was that the self-righting (roughly, the way in which they come to their feet) routine that many had thought to be instinctual was ineffective in low gravity. But the rats didn't simply fail to self-right. They 'invented' a new strategy that worked while they were weightless. They showed behavioral flexibility where none had previously been expected. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Instinct and Innate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25341) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-176 — Homo Economicus — Margaret Levi > Extreme competition, at the least, narrows focus to the goal at hand. In some forms, however, striving to be king of the hill and sometimes literally to be king does provoke something akin to a Hobbesian world. Shakespeare, as he often does, captures the power of circumstance and ambition; his version of the War of the Roses is a testament to narrow self-interested instrumentality dressed in the rhetoric of serving the country. Or witness the recent revelations about business ethics (or, rather, lack of ethics). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sara Miller McCune Director, Center For Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, professor, Stanford University; Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, University of Washington - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Homo Economicus](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25297) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-177 — [Questioning the Question:] Don't Give Wrong Theories Funerals. Just Stop Treating Them as True. — Richard H. Thaler > I have a problem with this question, so I will answer a somewhat different one. I suppose the intent of the question is to point to some ideas have been definitively shown to be either wrong or unhelpful, and so should be dropped from our scientific lexicon. In economics there are certainly many theories, hypotheses and models that are badly flawed descriptions of the behavior of economic agents, so one might think that I would have many nominations for ideas that should be given funerals. But I don't. That is because most of these theories, while demonstrably poor descriptions of reality, are extremely useful as theoretical baselines. As such, it would be a mistake to declare these theories dead. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Father of Behavioral Economics; Recipient, 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Author, Misbehaving - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [[Questioning the Question:] Don't Give Wrong Theories Funerals. Just Stop Treating Them as True.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25293) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-178 — The Mind Is Just The Brain — Tania Lombrozo > Now consider the mind. Most of us are interested in a theory of the mind because we want to explain, predict, and control behaviors, mental states, and experiences. Given that mental phenomena are physically realized in the brain, just as cake properties are physically realized by their ingredients and their interactions, it's no surprise that understanding the brain is incredibly useful. But if we want to know—for instance—how to influence minds to achieve particular behaviors, it would be a mistake to look for explanations solely at the level of the brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Mind Is Just The Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25290) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-179 — The Hard Problem — Daniel C. Dennett > One might object that the Hard Problem of consciousness (so dubbed by philosopher David Chalmers in his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind) isn't a scientific idea at all, and hence isn't an eligible candidate for this year's question, but since the philosophers who have adopted the term have also persuaded quite a few cognitive scientists that their best scientific work addresses only the "easy" problems of consciousness, this idea qualifies as scientific: it constrains scientific thinking, distorting scientists' imaginations as they attempt to formulate genuinely scientific theories of consciousness. (I won't give examples, since we are instructed to go after ideas, not people, in our answers.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Hard Problem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25289) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-180 — The Bigger An Animal's Brain, The Greater Its Intelligence — Nicholas Humphrey > The bigger an animal's brain, the greater its intelligence. You may think the connection is obvious. Just look at the evolutionary lineage of human beings: humans have bigger brains—and are cleverer—than chimpanzees, and chimpanzees have bigger brains—and are cleverer—than monkeys. Or, as an analogy, look at the history of computing machines in the 20th century. The bigger the machines, the greater their number-crunching powers. In the 1970's the new computer at my university department took up a whole room. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Bigger An Animal's Brain, The Greater Its Intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25284) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-181 — Naturalness, Hierarchy And Space-Time — Maria Spiropulu > The naturalness "strategy" and hierarchy "problem" for building models towards theories that extend the standard model of particles and their interactions (call it STh, standard theory a la David Gross) are crumbling with the measurements of the newly discovered Higgs-like boson. I call it still H-like until we have measured it exhaustively at the LHC. Nonetheless, we have built ourselves a story for what comes after the H elementary scalar that the real world does not appear to abide by. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology; Founder, AQT/INQNET - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Naturalness, Hierarchy And Space-Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25283) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-182 — Science *and* Technology — George Dyson > Pure mathematics is one example—from the Pythagoreans to Japanese temple geometry—of a science flourishing without technology. Imperial China developed sophisticated technologies while neglecting science, and it is all too easy to imagine a society that embraces technology but represses science, until only technology remains. Or, one particular species of technology might achieve such dominance that it halts the advance of science in order to preserve itself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Science *and* Technology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25266) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2014-183 — Fully Random Mutations — Kevin Kelly > On the contrary, there's much evidence that genetic mutation vary in patterns. For instance it is pretty much accepted that mutation rates increase or decrease as stress on the cells increases or decreases. These variable rates of mutation include mutations induced by stress from an organism's predators and competition, and as well as increased mutations brought on by environmental and epigenetic factors. Mutations have also been shown to have a higher chance of occurring near a place in DNA where mutations have already occurred, creating mutation hotspot clusters—a non-random pattern. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fully Random Mutations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25264) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted