Preface

The Edge Question

In 1991, I suggested the idea of a third culture, which “consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.” By 1997, the growth of the Internet had allowed implementation of a home for the third culture on the Web, on a site named Edge (www.edge.org).

Edge is a celebration of the ideas of the third culture, an exhibition of this new community of intellectuals in action. They present their work, their ideas, and comment about the work and ideas of third culture thinkers. They do so with the understanding that they are to be challenged. What emerges is rigorous discussion concerning crucial issues of the digital age in a highly charged atmosphere where “thinking smart” prevails over the anesthesiology of wisdom.

The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as 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, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions of who we are, of what it means to be human.

An annual feature of Edge is the World Question Center, which was introduced in 1971 as a conceptual art project by my friend and collaborator the late artist James Lee Byars. His plan was to gather the hundred most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them in, and “have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves.” The result was to be a synthesis of all thought. Between idea and execution, however, are many pitfalls. Byars identified his hundred most brilliant minds, called each of them, and asked them what questions they were asking themselves. The result: Seventy people hung up on him.

But by 1997, the Internet and e-mail had allowed for a serious implementation of Byars’s grand design, and this resulted in launching Edge. For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I have used the interrogative myself and asked contributors for their responses to a question that comes to me, or to one of my correspondents, in the middle of the night. The 2006 Edge Question was suggested by the psychologist Steven Pinker:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

The 2005 Edge Question was an eye-opener (BBC4 Radio characterized it as “fantastically stimulating…the crack cocaine of the thinking world”). It is hoped that this edition of responses to the 2006 Edge Question will be equally as dangerous.

John Brockman
Publisher & Editor, Edge