In summer 2009, during a talk at the Ideas Festival in Bristol, England, physicist Freeman Dyson articulated a vision for the future. Responding to the recent book The Age of Wonder, in which Richard Holmes describes how the first Romantic Age was centered on chemistry and poetry, Dyson pointed out that today a new “Age of Wonder” has arrived that is dominated by computational biology. Its leaders include genomics researcher Craig Venter, medical engineer Dean Kamen, computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and software architect and mathematician Charles Simonyi. The nexus for this intellectual activity, he observed, is online at Edge.org.
Dyson envisions an age of biology where “a new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses, might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds to enrich the ecology of our planet. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder. The new Age of Wonder might bring together wealthy entrepreneurs like Venter and Kamen . . . and a worldwide community of gardeners and farmers and breeders, working together to make the planet beautiful as well as fertile, hospitable to hummingbirds as well as to humans.”
Indeed, Dyson was present at the August 2007 Edge meeting “Life: What a Concept,” where he and genomics researchers Craig Venter and George Church, biologist Robert Shapiro, exo-biologist and astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, and quantum physicist Seth Lloyd presented their new, and in more than a few cases, startling research, and/or ideas in the biological sciences. “The meeting,” according to Suedduetsche Zeitung, the largest national German newspaper, “was one of those memorable events that people in years to come will see as a crucial moment in history. After all, it’s where the dawning of the age of biology was officially announced.”
So, what is Edge.org?
First, Edge is people.
As the late artist James Lee Byars and I once wrote: “To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.” At the center of every Edge publication and event are remarkable people and remarkable minds. Edge, at its core, consists of the scientists, artists, philosophers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who are at the center of today’s intellectual, technological, and scientific landscape.
Second, Edge is events. Through its special lectures, Master Classes, and annual dinners in California, London, Paris, and New York, Edge gathers together the “third-culture” scientific intellectuals and technology pioneers who are exploring the themes of the post-industrial age. In this regard, commenting about the 2008 Edge Master Class “A Short Course in Behavioral Economics,” science historian George Dyson wrote:
Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of fiddling while Rome burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What’s new? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years.
It was a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds. These are the people that are rewriting our global culture.
Third, Edge.org is a conversation.
Edge is different from the Algonquin Roundtable or Bloomsbury Group, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. Closer resemblances are the early 17th-century Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society. Its members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society’s common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another inspiration is the Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age—James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, and Benjamin Franklin.
The online Edge.org salon is a living document of millions of words that charts the Edge conversation over the past fifteen years wherever it goes. It is available, gratis, to the general public.
Edge.org was launched in 1996 as the online version of the Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals that met from 1981–1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, the board rooms of Rockefeller University and the New York Academy of Sciences, and investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms, and elsewhere. Though the venue is now in cyberspace, the spirit of the Reality Club lives on in the lively back-and-forth conversations on the hot-button ideas driving the discussion today.
In the words of the novelist Ian McEwan, Edge.org is “open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful . . . an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world . . . an ongoing and thrilling colloquium.”
In this, the first volume of The Best of Edge Series, we focus on ideas about “Mind.” We are pleased to present eighteen pieces, original works from the online pages of Edge.org, which consist of edited interviews, commissioned essays, and transcribed talks, many of which are accompanied online with streaming video. While there’s no doubt about the value of online presentations, the role of books, whether bound and printed or presented electronically, is still an invaluable way to present important ideas. Thus, we are pleased to be able to offer this series of books to the public.
For this first volume, cutting-edge theoretical psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, neurobiologists, linguists, behavioral geneticists, and moral psychologists explore new ways of thinking about “Mind.”
In “Organs of Computation” (1997), Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that “most of the assumptions about the mind that underlie current discussions are many decades out-of-date.” He presents his idea that the basic understanding that the human mind is a remarkably complex processor of information, an “organ of extreme perfection and complication,” to use Darwin’s phrase, has not made it into the mainstream of intellectual life.
In “Philosophy in the Flesh” (1999), Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff makes the point that “we are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything—only what our embodied brains permit.”
New York University neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, in “Parallel Memories” (1997), argues for putting “emotion back into the brain and integrate it with cognitive systems. We shouldn’t study emotion or cognition in isolation, but should study both as aspects of the mind in its brain.”
Our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines, says University of New Mexico psychologist Geoffrey Miller in “Sexual Selection and the Mind” (1998). He makes the point that “evolution is driven not just by natural selection for survival, but by an equally important process that Darwin called sexual selection through mate choice.” He proposes that the human mind’s most impressive, baffling abilities are courtship tools, evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners. By switching from a survival-centered view of evolution to a courtship-centered view, he attempts to show how we can understand the mysteries of mind.
Open University Emeritus Professor and neurobiologist Steven Rose is obsessed with the relationship between mind and brain. In “Rescuing Memory” (1999), he outlines his approach to understanding this relationship which has been to look for ways in which we can locate changes in behavior, thought, or action, which can be mapped in some way onto changes in physiology and biochemistry, and changes in structure in the brain, that is in processes that you can study biologically. For most of his life, the search has been focused on how we should understand learning and memory.
“During the last two decades,” says evolutionary theorist Frank Sulloway in “How Is Personality Formed?” (1998), “I have experienced a major shift in my career interests. I started out as a historian of science and was primarily interested in historical questions about people’s intellectual lives. In trying to understand the sources of creative achievement in science, I gradually became interested in problems of human development and especially in how Darwinian theory can help us to understand the development of personality. I now consider myself a psychologist, in addition to being an historian.”
University of California at San Diego neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s widely cited essay “Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind ‘the Great Leap Forward’ in Human Evolution” (2000) concerns “the discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution—which I speculate on in this essay—is the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”
Theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor, London School of Economics, writes in his essay “A Self Worth Having” (2003) that “what I’m now thinking—though it certainly needs further work—is basically that the point of there being a phenomenally rich subjective present is that it provides a new domain for selfhood. Gottlob Frege, the great logician of the early 20th century, made the obvious but crucial observation that a first-person subject has to be the subject of something. In which case we can ask, what kind of something is up to doing the job? What kind of thing is of sufficient metaphysical weight to supply the experiential substrate of a self—or, at any rate, a self worth having? And the answer I’d now suggest is: nothing less than phenomenal experience—phenomenal experience with its intrinsic depth and richness, with its qualities of seeming to be more than any physical thing could be.”
Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, in “You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel” (2005), argues that “when you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you’re going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That’s the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that’s the wrong analysis. It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that ‘little shop of horrors.’ ”
In V. S. Ramachandran’s second essay “The Neurology of Self-Awareness” (2007), he writes, “What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the ‘turning inward’ aspect of the self—its recursiveness—that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.”
“Eudaemonia: The Good Life” (2004) is University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman’s term for a “third form of happiness.” This is meaning, which is “again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning.”
Collège de France experimental cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dehaene’s “What Are Numbers, Really? A Cerebral Basis for Number Sense” (1997) presents research that number is very much like color. “Because we live in a world full of discrete and movable objects,” he writes, “it is very useful for us to be able to extract number. This can help us to track predators or to select the best foraging grounds, to mention only very obvious examples. This is why evolution has endowed our brains and those of many animal species with simple numerical mechanisms. In animals, these mechanisms are very limited, as we shall see below: they are approximate, their representation becomes coarser for increasingly large numbers, and they involve only the simplest arithmetic operations (addition and subtraction). We, humans, have also had the remarkable good fortune to develop abilities for language and for symbolic notation. This has enabled us to develop exact mental representations for large numbers, as well as algorithms for precise calculations.”
In “The Assortative Mating Theory” (2005) Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen says that his thesis “with regard to sex differences is quite moderate, in that I do not discount environmental factors; I’m just saying, don’t forget about biology. To me that sounds very moderate. But for some people in the field of gender studies, even that is too extreme. They want it to be all environment and no biology. You can understand that politically that was an important position in the 1960s, in an effort to try to change society. But is it a true description, scientifically, of what goes on? It’s time to distinguish politics and science, and just look at the evidence.”
Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, in “Toxo: The Parasite that Is Manipulating Human Behavior” (2009), notes that “the parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It’s got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you’re ever pregnant, if you’re ever around anyone who’s pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It’s a disaster.”
“We’ve known for a long time that human children are the best learning machines in the universe, says Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik in “Amazing Babies” (2009), “but it has always been like the mystery of the humming birds. We know that they fly, but we don’t know how they can possibly do it. We could say that babies learn, but we didn’t know how.”
Stanislas Dehaene presents the results of his recent research in “Signatures of Consciousness” (2009). Over the last twelve years, “my research team has been using all the brain research tools at its disposal, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit, or a sound).”
In “How Can Educated People Continue to Be Radical Environmentalists?” (1998), the late psychologist and behavioral geneticist David Lykken, formerly Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota, writes that “were it not for ideological prejudice any rational person looking at the evidence would agree that human aptitudes, personality traits, many interests and personal idiosyncrasies, even some social attitudes, owe from 30 to 70 percent of their variation across people to the genetic differences between people. The ideological barrier seems to involve the conviction that accepting these facts means accepting biological determinism, Social Darwinism, racism, and other evils.” He draws on his famous study of 4,000 twins for comparisons between genetic and environmental effects on human psychology. “A better formula than Nature versus Nurture would be Nature via Nurture,” he claims in support of his argument that the “genetic influences are strong and most of us develop along a path determined mainly by our personal genetic steersmen.”
University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion” (2007) that “it might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative, and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems). I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.”
John Brockman
Editor and Publisher
Edge.org