The New Humanists: Science at the Edge

418 Pages·2003·9.01 MB·English

by  John Brockman

NEW
IE
UMANISTS
science at the edge
JOHN BROCKMAN
$19-95 U.S.A
$29.95 Canada
THE NEW
HUMANISTS
science at the edge
“Something radically new is in the air: new
ways of understanding physical systems, new
ways of thinking about thinking that call into
question many of our basic assumptions. The
arts and the sciences are again joining together
as one culture, the third culture. Those involved
in this effort—on either side ofC.P. Snow's old
divide—are at the center of today’s intellectual
action. They are the new humanists.”
— John Brockman
Who are the cutting-edge thinkers of today?
Scientists, according to John Brockman, editor,
author, and founder of the intellectual forum,
Edge (www.edge.org). Brockman argues that
scientists — through their research and writing
— are creating a “third culture” in which the
word “humanism” is once more defined in
terms of the 15th century idea of one intellec­
tual whole.
Combining this holistic awareness of the
humanities and science, these “new human­
ists” are the ones shaping modern thought.
Many of the pieces in The New Humanists:
Science At the Edge are narratives created by
Brockman from his conversations with over 20
of the top intellectuals of today including:
> Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of Guns, Cerms and Steel, on population
theory;
> Steven Pinker, author of the best-selling, How
the Mind Works, discussing human nature;
Books by John Brockman
As Author:
By the Late John Brockman
31
Afterwords
The Third Culture
Digerati
As Editor:
About Bateson
Speculations
Doing Science
Ways of Knowing
Creativity
The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years
The Next Fifty Years
As Coeditor:
How Things Are
THE NEW
HUMANISTS
science at the edge
edited by
JOHN BROCKMAN
Barnes
ÍKNoble
B O O K S
A Barnes and Noble Book
Copyright (c) 2003 by John Brockman
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book can be used or reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
written permission from the Publisher _
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Available upon request
The New Humanists: Science At the Edge
ISBN: 0760745293
Printed and bound in the United States of America
03 04 05 06 07 MC 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
RRD-H
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments v
Introduction: The New Humanists by John Brockman 1
Part I: Homo sapiens 13
Jared Diamond: A New Scientific Synthesis
of Human History 15
Steven Pinker: A Biological Understanding
of Human Nature 3 3
Helena Cronin: Getting Human Nature Right 53
Andy Clark: Natural Born Cyborgs? 67
Marc D. Hauser: Animal Minds 79
Richard Wrangham: The Evolution of Cooking 99
Daniel C. Dennett: The Computational
Perspective 111
Stephen M. Kosslyn: What Shape Are a
German Shepherd’s Ears? 125
Part n*. Machina sapiens? 145
Jordan B. Pollack: Software Is a Cultural Solvent 147
David Gelemter: The Second Coming—
a Manifesto 157
Rodney Brooks: Making Living Systems 169
Hans Moravec: Making Minds 177
VI Table of Contents
David Deutsch: Quantum Computation 187
Marvin Minsky: What Comes After Minds? 197
Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity 215
Jaron Lanier: One Half of a Manifesto 233
Part IH: Evolving Universes . .. 265
Seth Lloyd: How Fast, How Small, and How
Powerful? Moore’s Law and the Ultimate
Laptop 267
Alan Guth: A Golden Age of Cosmology 285
Paul Steinhardt: The Cyclic Universe 297
Lisa Randall: Theories of the Brane 313
Lee Smolin: Loop Quantum Gravity 329
Martin Rees: A Look Ahead 353
Epilogue: Responses to “The New Humanists” 363
Nicholas Humphrey, Jaron Lanier, Joseph LeDoux, John Horgan,
Timothy Taylor, Carlo Rovelli, Steven Johnson, Lee Smolin,
Douglas Rushkoff, Piet Hut, Marc D. Hauser, Mihalyi Csikzent-
mihalyi, Denis Dutton, Daniel C. Dennett, Howard Rheingold,
Chris Anderson
Suggested Reading 401
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From the very beginning of Edge, I have received a great deal
of encouragement and support from key people in the
Barnes & Noble organization, including Steve Riggio, Mike
Ferrari, and Michael Friedman. They approached me with
the idea that a volume based on Edge (www.edge.org) would
make a valuable book, and I thank them for the suggestion
and their encouragement. I also wish to thank Michael Frag-
nito and Laura Nolan of Barnes & Noble Publishing for
backing this project.
Russell Weinberger, associate publisher of Edge, has been
involved in all aspects of publication and Christopher
Williams worked closely with me editorially on the initial
transformation of many of the Q&A transcripts into essay
form, as well as providing English translations of German
texts. I wish to thank them both for their valuable contribu­
tions.
I wish to thank Judy Herrick of Typro for her work in
transcribing all the interviews. And finally, I am indebted to
Sara Lippincott for her thoughtful and meticulous editing.
INTRODUCTION:
THE NEW HUMANISTS
J o h n B r o c k m a n
In 1991, in an essay entitled “The Emerging Third Cul­
ture,” I put forward the following argument:
In the past few years, the playing field of American
intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intel­
lectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s
education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a suf­
ficient qualification for a thinking person today. In­
deed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a
sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often
proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly
significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.
Their culture, which dismisses science, is often non-
empirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own
laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on
comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventu­
ally reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
Twelve years later, that fossil culture has been essentially
replaced by the “third culture” of the essay’s title—a refer­
ence to C. P. Snow’s celebrated division of the thinking world
into two cultures, that of the literary intellectual and that of
the scientist. This new culture consists of those scientists and
other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their
work and expository writing, have taken the place of the tra­
2 Introduction: The New Humanists
ditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings
of our lives, redefining who and what we are.
The scientists of the third culture share their work and
ideas not just with each other but with a newly educated pub­
lic, through their books. Focusing on the real world, they
have led us into one of the most dazzling periods of intellec­
tual activity in human history. The achievements of the third
culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome man­
darin class; they affect the lives of everybody on the planet.
The emergence of this new culture is evidence of a great in­
tellectual hunger, a desire for the new and important ideas
that drive our times: revolutionary developments in molecu­
lar biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial
intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism,
neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adap­
tive systems, linguistics, superstrings, biodiversity, the hu­
man genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium,
cellular automata, fuzzy logic, virtual reality, cyberspace, and
teraflop machines. Among others.
HUMANISM AND
THE INTELLECTUAL WHOLE
Around the fifteenth century, the word “humanism” was tied
in with the idea of one intellectual whole. A Florentine no­
bleman knew that to read Dante but ignore science was
ridiculous. Leonardo was a great artist, a great scientist, a
great technologist. Michelangelo was an even greater artist
and engineer. These men were intellectually holistic giants.
To them, the idea of embracing humanism while remaining
ignorant of the latest scientific and technological achieve­
ments would have been incomprehensible. The time has
come to reestablish that holistic definition.