Whatever anybody says, I feel that the hard problem of consciousness is still very hard, and to try and rest your ethical case on proving something that has baffled people for years seems to me to be not good for animals. Much, much better to say let's go for something tangible, something we can measure. Are the animals healthy, do they have what they want? Then if you can show that, then that's a much, much better basis for making your decisions.
MARIAN STAMP DAWKINS is professor of animal behaviour at the University of Oxford, where she heads the Animal Behaviour Research Group. She is the author of Why Animals Matter.
Marian Stamp Dawkin's Edge Bio Page
[35 minutes]
The Reality Club: Nicholas Humphrey
WHAT DO ANIMALS WANT?
The questions I'm asking myself are really about how much we really know about animal consciousness. A lot of people think we do, or think that we don't need scientific evidence. It really began to worry me that people were basing their arguments on something that we really can't know about at all. One of the questions I asked myself was: how much do we really know? And is what we know the best basis for arguing for animal welfare? I've been thinking hard about that, and I came to the conclusion that the hard problem of consciousness is actually very hard. It's still there, and we kid ourselves if we think we've solved it.
There's a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day don't realize that information is physical and that there is no such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can compute things.
~~
I think it's important to regard science not as an enterprise for the purpose of making predictions, but as an enterprise for the purpose of discovering what the world is really like, what is really there, how it behaves and why.
DAVID DEUTSCH is a Physicist at the University of Oxford. His research in quantum physics has been influential and highly acclaimed. His papers on quantum computation laid the foundations for that field, breaking new ground in the theory of computation as well as physics, and have triggered an explosion of research efforts worldwide. He is the recipient of the $100,000 Edge of Computation Prize, and he is the author of The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality.
David Deutsch's Edge Bio Page
CONSTRUCTOR THEORY
Some considerable time ago we were discussing my idea, new at the time, for constructor theory, which was and is an idea I had for generalizing the quantum theory of computation to cover not just computation but all physical processes. I guessed and still guess that this is going to provide a new mode of description of physical systems and laws of physics. It will also have new laws of its own which will be deeper than the deepest existing theories, such as quantum theory and relativity. At the time, I was very enthusiastic about this, and what intervened between then and now is that writing a book took much longer than I expected. But now I'm back to it, and we're working on constructor theory and, if anything, I would say it's fulfilling its promise more than I expected and sooner than I expected.
One of the first rather unexpected yields of this theory has been a new foundation for information theory. There's a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day don't realize that information is physical and that there is no such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can compute things.
On the other hand, physicists have always known that in order to do the work that the theory of information does within physics, such as informing the theory of statistical mechanics, and thereby, thermodynamics (the second law of thermodynamics), information has to be a physical quantity. And yet, information is independent of the physical object that it resides in.
There are many other features in the head that help us become exceptional long-distance walkers and runners. I became obsessed with the idea that humans evolved to run long distances, evolved to walk long distances, basically evolved to use our bodies as athletes. These traces are there in our heads along with those brains.
DANIEL LIEBERMAN is Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research combines experimental biology and paleontology to ask why and how the human body looks and functions the way it does. He is especially interested in the origin of bipedal walking, the biology and evolution of endurance running, and the evolution of the human head. He also loves to run.
Daniel Lieberman's Edge Bio Page
BRAINS PLUS BRAWN
I've been thinking a lot about the concept of whether or not human evolution is a story of brains over brawn. I study the evolution of the human body and how and why the human body is the way it is, and I've worked a lot on both ends of the body. I'm very interested in feet and barefoot running and how our feet function, but I've also written and thought a lot about how and why our heads are the way they are. The more I study feet and heads, the more I realize that what's in the middle also matters, and that we have this very strange idea —it goes back to mythology—that human evolution is primarily a story about brains, about intelligence, about technology triumphing over brawn.
If we're going to get science policy right, it's really important for us to study the economic benefit of open access and not accept the arguments of incumbents. Existing media companies claim that they need ever stronger and longer copyright protection and new, draconian laws to protect them, and meanwhile, new free ecosystems, like the Web, have actually led to enormous wealth creation and enormous new opportunities for social value. And yes, they did in fact lead in some cases to the destruction of incumbents, but that's the kind of creative destruction that we should celebrate in the economy. We have to accept that, particularly in the area of science, there's an incredible opportunity for open access to enable new business models.
TIM O'REILLY is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., a leading computer book publisher. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Strata series of conferences on big data, and Tools of Change for Publishing. O'Reilly Media's Maker Media unit publishes Make Magazine and operates Maker Faire, the world's largest gathering of DIY hardware enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is a leading early stage venture capital firm.
"THE CLOTHESLINE PARADOX"
[TIM O'REILLY:] I've been thinking a lot lately about a piece I read in Stuart Brand's, CoEvolution Quarterly back in 1975. It's called the "Clothesline Paradox." The author, Steve Baer, was talking about alternative energy. The thesis is simple: You put your clothes in the dryer, and the energy you use gets measured and counted. You hang your clothes on the clothesline, and it "disappears" from the economy. It struck me that there are a lot of things that we're dealing with on the Internet that are subject to the Clothesline Paradox. Value is created, but it's not measured and counted. It's captured somewhere else in the economy.
One question that fascinated me in the last two years is, can we ever use data to control systems? Could we go as far as, not only describe and quantify and mathematically formulate and perhaps predict the behavior of a system, but could you use this knowledge to be able to control a complex system, to control a social system, to control an economic system?
ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics, Computer Science and Biology, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Albert-László Barabási Edge Bio Page
THINKING IN NETWORK TERMS
[ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI:] We always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it. We were aware of it down the line, that we're not independent from our environment, that we're not independent of the people around us. We are not independent of the many economic and other forces. But for decades we never perceived connectedness as being quantifiable, as being something that we can describe, that we can measure, that we have ways of quantifying the process. That has changed drastically in the last decade, at many, many different levels.
The issue is that when you look at the world from these sorts of institutional lenses, identifying problems becomes relatively easy. Solving them becomes very hard. It's no mystery how you get economic growth. You need to provide opportunities and incentives. But how do you make that political equilibrium? How do you make it so that everybody in society actually agrees and abides by a system that provides those incentives and opportunities even if it's not in their short-term interests? Those are the real challenges and that's exactly the sorts of issues we're seeing in Europe, it's the sorts of issues we're seeing in the United States, it's the sorts of issues we're seeing in Turkey. The problems are reasonably easy to identify. Developing solutions to them is hard because you cannot develop the solutions from the outside. It's not an engineering problem. At the end of the day you really need the grassroots solution to it. You really need people themselves to start taking part in the political process because any solution you impose from above is not going to stick unless it has the support of the people, unless the people themselves are the ones who push for it, who demand it, and who implement that solution.
DARON ACEMOGLU is the Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. In 2005 he received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. He is the author of Why Nations Fail.
Daron Acemoglu's Edge Bio Page
THE WORLD THROUGH INSTITUTIONAL LENSES
[DARON ACEMOGLU:] When I got into economics one of the things that attracted me was thinking about why some nations are rich and some are poor, why some are democratic and others aren't, and why they're socially, politically, and economically so different. I grew up in Turkey and I came of age in the middle of a military regime and the economy wasn't doing well so those questions were in the air. That's the sort of thing that attracted me to economics.
When I came into economics I realized those weren't the issues that most economists worked on. I was still interested in economic development and economic growth, but I tried to think about it using the same approach as economists did. Then about 17 or 18 years ago, I started talking to James Robinson who became my long time collaborator, and James and I both had the same issues with the economics approach. A lot of the interesting issues related to politics, institutions, and the roots of the politics of policies and institutions were left out. We started working, thinking, and discussing to try to write papers on these things. At the time it wasn't a big area within economics.
Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution.
JOSEPH HENRICH is an anthropologist and Professor of Psychology and Economics. He is the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution at University of British Columbia.
Joseph Henrich's Edge Bio Page
[39:00 minutes]
[ED. NOTE: This conversation with Joe Henrich was conducted in Vancouver for Edge by Jennifer Jacquet.]
HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION
[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
We've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information.
Recently we have published a number of Conversations on related subjects such as "Big Data", "Linked Data", "Data Science", "Web Science", "Semantic Web", "Network Science". Clearly, a new realm is rapidly coming into public consciousness. In this regard, we have set up this "Special Event" page on "Computational Social Science" to organize and present this material to our readers and to provide access to the ongoing Edge Conversations and related discussions.
Published to date are eight Conversations with: Dirk Helbing, Nicholas A. Christakis, J. Craig Venter, |
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THIS WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking Foreword By David Brooks Edited by John Brockman [2.17.12] |
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MEET THE PROPRIETOR OF THE CLUB OF GENIUSES. John Brockman is that type of person who is able to gather around himself in one place the most creative and intelligent people.
Rafael Tonon, Galileu (Brasil)
[10.1.12]
In spite of his serious expression, his friends and acquaintances say that he is a man of enviable rhetoric, able to hold the attention of anyone. Brockman is the name behind the Edge (edge.org), the virtual forum that brings together big names of Global Science — such as Craig Venter, one of the greatest, who is responsible for sequencing the human genome, Steven Pinker, the Canadian psychologist named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, famous for his defe... |
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DREAMING OF A EUROPEAN SALON ... I am became smarter because of a book titled "This Will Make You Smarter". Although the title suggests that I've come across a remaindered book in the self-help section, it is an anthology of essays by members of edge.org.
Mark Geels, Science Palooza (Netherlands)
[9.19.12]
...This makes the website clear, direct, and without arrogant elitism. The ideas linking to knowledge are not there to be popularized but to be explored. Members are admitted by invitation and include scientists Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter, composer Brian Eno, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and author Ian McEwen. Brockman: "all members are distinguished by the fact that they generate new ideas. They are not people who are only discussing new things". |
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MIND AMPLIFIER: HOWARD RHEINGOLD AND THE VALUE OF CONVIVIAL TOOLS "I direct my students to a few conversation threads that exemplify substantial, civil, intelligent online discussions.
Anthony Wing Kosner, Forbes
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Here is one about online identity. Here is one on Atlantic.com commenting on Nicholas Carr's article, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' ... The conversations on edge.org are generally very high quality..."
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THE KEY TO SPIRITUAL HEIGHTS ... Brilliant minds explain the importance of cooperation and risk expertise - and make you smarter
Von Balz Spörri, Sonntags Zeitung
[12.31.69]
The responses of the researchers can identify trends that will shape the science in the coming years. This year marks a major trend: the importance of cooperation. Since the 1960s have biologists and social scientists disputed stubborn that among animals and human altruism admit, writes about the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia: "Any form of altruism has been explained away as a disguised form of egoism, the natural end of Selection serve. "Only slowly set by the realization that this" biological ... |
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HUMANISM AND SCIENCE MUST BE KEPT SEPARATE Telmo Pievani At The Biogem: The Evolution Of Knowledge Comes From The Dialogue Of Two Distinct Worlds
By John Caprara, Corriere Della Sera
[9.9.12]
In trying to overcome between the two cultures in 1991 the writer and American literary agent John Brockman threw a cultural movement called the "third culture": his intention was to unite intellectuals and scientists in a transversal logic can illuminate the deep meaning of 'human existence starting from the consideration that the development of science had become interdisciplinary. ... Brockman's ideas are outdated - only a recognition of separate cultures and looking for a constant comparison between them can guarantee a co... |
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THIS COLUMN WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE: SELF-PERCEPTION THEORY After purchasing the latte, we assume that we are coffee connoisseurs," as the psychologist Timothy Wilson writes on edge.org.
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian
[10.5.12]
After returning the lost wallet, we conclude that we're honest. In reality, many pressures shape our behaviour..."
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ASSUMING WE DEVELOP THE CAPABILITY, SHOULD WE BRING BACK EXTINCT SPECIES? And what about tweaking them a bit in the process to, say, make them less of a threat to humans?
Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic
[8.30.12]
According to an interview with Ryan Phelan, executive director of a project called Revive and Restore, at the Science Foo conference at the Googleplex earlier this month, there are now three techniques that may someday give scientists that ability: backbreeding (trying to work evolution backward, basically, to s... |
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THIS WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER
New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking.Edited by John Brockman.
Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99.
Jascha Hoffman, New York Times - Sunday Book Review
[8.5.12]
Delving into this book is like overhearing a heated conversation in a lab. It captures the preoccupations of top scientists and offers a rare chance to discover big ideas before they hit the mainstream. |
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CRAIG VENTER: DNA BY E-MAIL AND IN 3D FOR TAILORED VACCINES
GABRIEL BECCARIA, LA STAMPA
[7.12.12]
We will decipher DNA ship at lightning speed around the world, where it is necessary. Yesterday evening you could hear these prophecies by Craig Venter in Turin, in an event known as the "Edge Dinner", one of the many dinners between scientists and assorted guests organized around the world by John Brockman, the literary agent American stars of science. |
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HOW TO CURE A PHANTOM LIMB. In the past, scientists often presented ideas in books that were understandable by non-specialists.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Il Sole 24 ORE - Domenica
[7.1.12]
Think of the Origin of Species and the emotional expressions of Darwin, in fact almost all his books, to those of Galileo an In the last century that the custom seemed to be lost, but it has been given new life by a literary agent, John Brockman, and authors such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Francis Crick, Eric Kandel, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. |
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