The EDGE Question—2018
"Another devilishly clever question—the 'question' question."
—Stanislas Dehaene
"Fascinating...Each one a little cluster bomb of possibilities."
—Annalena McAfee
"One of the most stimulating pieces of (collective) writing ever."
— Andrian Kreye
"Chrysanthemum" [expand] by Katinka Matson | katinkamatson.com
"WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?"
After twenty years, I’ve run out of questions. So, for the finale to a noteworthy Edge project, can you ask "The Last Question"?
Interrogate Reality
Did I say "twenty years"? My strange obsession with the idea of "Question" goes back to 1968 when I first wrote about the idea of interrogating reality 1…
"The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present. 2 The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it.
"Everything has been explained. There is nothing left to consider. The explanation can no longer be treated as a definition. The question: a description. The answer: not explanation, but a description and knowing how to consider it. Asking or telling: there isn’t any difference.
"No explanation, no solution, but consideration of the question. Every proposition proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the universe required for the fact. 3
"Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions. 4 What is important is not to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such to themselves. 5
"A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in huge libraries filled with books, in fantastic amounts of data stored on servers. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative."
The conceptual artist/philosopher James Lee Byars contacted me and suggested a collaboration of sorts which resulted in our taking daily walks in Central Park as Byars and I walked and talked, conversing only in interrogative sentences. Does it sound like fun? Want to try it?
James Lee soon began to develop his ideas which led to "The World Question Center":
“To arrive at an axiology of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”
On November 26, 1968, he launched "The World Question Center" in a one-hour television program produced in Brussels at the studios of the Belgian National Television Network and broadcast live to a national audience.
During the hour, he called numerous celebrated intellectuals such as composer John Cage, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, futurist Herman Kahn, artist Joseph Beuys, novelist Jerzy Kosinski, poet Michael McClure, and asked, in various ways, the following:
"I’m trying to find hypotheses that people are working with that are reduced into some type of very simple single question with no explanation, hopefully, that’s important to them in their own evolution of knowledge. Might you offer one that’s personal?"
For the 50th anniversary of "The World Question Center," and for the finale to the twenty years of Edge Questions, I turned it over to the Edgies:
"Ask 'The Last Question,' your last question, the question for which you will be remembered."
—John Brockman
Editor, Edge
____
Notes
1 John Brockman, By The Late John Brockman (New York: Macmillan, 1969)
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 58e, para. 315.
3 Alfred North Whitehead, Process And Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p.17.
4 Paul Valery, The Outlook For Intelligence (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
5 Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Nina Stegeman, Associate Editor
Katinka Matson, Co-founder & Resident Artist
Thanks to Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson for 20 years of advice and support.
What Is The Last Question?
(start reading here)
Contributors: [PAGE 1] Scott Aaronson, Anthony Aguirre, Dorsa Amir, Chris Anderson, Ross Anderson, Alun Anderson, Samuel Arbesman, Dan Ariely, Noga Arikha, W. Brian Arthur, Scott Atran, Joscha Bach, Mahzarin Banaji, Simon Baron-Cohen, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Andrew Barron, Thomas A. Bass, Mary Catherine Bateson, Gregory Benford, Laura Betzig, Susan Blackmore, Alan S. Blinder
[PAGE 2] Paul Bloom, Giulio Boccaletti, Ian Bogost, Joshua Bongard, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Rodney A. Brooks, David M. Buss, Philip Campbell, Jimena Canales, Christopher Chabris, David Chalmers, Leo M. Chalupa, Ashvin Chhabra, Jaeweon Cho, Nicholas A. Christakis, David Christian, Brian Christian, George Church, Andy Clark
[PAGE 3] Julia Clarke, Tyler Cowen, Jerry A. Coyne, James Croak, Molly Crockett, Helena Cronin, Oliver Scott Curry, David Dalrymple, Kate Darling, Luca De Biase, Stanislas Dehaene, Daniel C. Dennett, Emanuel Derman, David Deutsch, Keith Devlin, Jared Diamond, Chris DiBona, Rolf Dobelli, P. Murali Doraiswamy, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson
[PAGE 4] David M. Eagleman, David Edelman, Nick Enfield, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Dylan Evans, Daniel L. Everett, Christine Finn, Stuart Firestein, Helen Fisher, Steve Fuller, Howard Gardner, David C. Geary, James Geary, Amanda Gefter, Neil Gershenfeld, Asif A. Ghazanfar, Steve Giddings, Gerd Gigerenzer, Bruno Giussani
[PAGE 5] Joel Gold, Nigel Goldenfeld, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Daniel Goleman, Alison Gopnik, John Gottman, Jonathan Gottschall, William Grassie, Kurt Gray, A. C. Grayling, Tom Griffiths, June Gruber, Jonathan Haidt, David Haig, Hans Halvorson, Timo Hannay, Judith Rich Harris, Sam Harris, Daniel Haun, Marti Hearst, Dirk Helbing
[PAGE 6] César Hidalgo, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Michael Hochberg, Donald D. Hoffman, Bruce Hood, Daniel Hook, John Horgan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Nicholas Humphrey, Marco Iacoboni, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Nina Jablonski, Matthew O. Jackson, Jennifer Jacquet, Dale W Jamieson, Koo Jeong-A, Lorraine Justice, Gordon Kane, Stuart A. Kauffman
[PAGE 7] Brian G. Keating, Paul Kedrosky, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, Gary Klein, Jon Kleinberg, Brian Knutson, Bart Kosko, Stephen M. Kosslyn, John W. Krakauer, Kai Krause, Lawrence M. Krauss, Andrian Kreye, Coco Krumme, Robert Kurzban, Joseph LeDoux, Cristine H. Legare, Martin Lercher, Margaret Levi, Janna Levin
[PAGE 8] Andrei Linde, Tania Lombrozo, Antony Garrett Lisi, Mario Livio, Seth Lloyd, Jonathan B. Losos, Greg Lynn, Ziyad Marar, Gary Marcus, John Markoff, Chiara Marletto, Abigail Marsh, Barnaby Marsh, John C. Mather, Tim Maudlin, Annalena McAfee, Michael McCullough, Ian McEwan, Ryan McKay, Hugo Mercier, Thomas Metzinger
[PAGE 9] Yuri Milner, Read Montague, Dave Morin, Lisa Mosconi, David G. Myers, Priyamvada Natarajan, John Naughton, Randolph Nesse, Richard Nisbett, Tor Nørretranders, Michael I. Norton, Martin Nowak, James J. O'Donnell, Tim O'Reilly, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Steve Omohundro, Toby Ord, Gloria Origgi, Mark Pagel, Elaine Pagels, Bruce Parker
[PAGE 10] Josef Penninger, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford Pickover, Steven Pinker, David Pizarro, Robert Plomin, Jordan Pollack, Alex Poots, Carolyn Porco, William Poundstone, William H. Press, Robert Provine, Matthew Putman, David C. Queller, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Lisa Randall, S. Abbas Raza, Syed Tasnim Raza, Martin Rees, Ed Regis, Diana Reiss
[PAGE 11] Gianluigi Ricuperati, Jennifer Richeson, Siobhan Roberts, Andrés Roemer, Phil Rosenzweig, Carlo Rovelli, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Todd C. Sacktor, Paul Saffo, Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Buddhini Samarasinghe, Scott Sampson, Laurie R. Santos, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Roger Schank, Rene Scheu, Maximilian Schich, Simone Schnall
[PAGE 12] Bruce Schneier, Peter Schwartz, Gino Segre, Charles Seife, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Michael Shermer, Olivier Sibony, Laurence C. Smith, Monica L. Smith, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Nina Stegeman, Paul Steinhardt, Bruce Sterling, Stephen J. Stich, Victoria Stodden, Christopher Stringer, Seirian Sumner, Leonard Susskind, Jaan Tallinn,
[PAGE 13] Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Richard H. Thaler, Frank Tipler, Eric Topol, Sherry Turkle, Barbara Tversky, Michael Vassar, J. Craig Venter, Athena Vouloumanos, D.A. Wallach, Adam Waytz, Bret Weinstein, Eric R. Weinstein, Albert Wenger, Geoffrey West, Thalia Wheatley, Tim White, Linda Wilbrecht, Frank Wilczek
[PAGE 14] Jason Wilkes, Evan Williams, Alexander Wissner-Gross, Milford H. Wolpoff, Richard Wrangham, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Richard Saul Wurman, Victoria Wyatt, Itai Yanai, Dustin Yellin, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, Dan Zahavi, Anton Zeilinger, Carl Zimmer
If you were left with the chance of asking only one fundamental question about the future of humanity, which one would it be? That's exactly what legendary American literary agent John Brockman wanted to know of freethinkers, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs moving at and across the very borders of modern thought. We present their best answers – in question form.
What is a philosopher? Philosophers are people who formulate questions in a way that they can’t be answered unequivocally. This may sound problematic but is undoubtedly a high art. The classical example, in Leibniz's words, is as simple as it is beautiful: Why is there something and not nothing? Later, Immanuel Kant called the art of such questions metaphysics and recognized in it the opposite of science – namely a "natural system" of man. Reason is beset by questions that it cannot reject and just as little can answer. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws a clear line between knowledge and speculation. But it is precisely this line that has become fragile with the life sciences, with information theory and digital technology.
The Portrait Magazine: 2017 "Global 30"
(Primary criteria for selection to the 2017 “Global 30” is the influence
on Chinese society. Political figures are not included in the selection.)
Ask the Global 30
English
Interview | Yang Lu
13
ASK THE FOUNDER OF ONE OF THE SMARTEST WEBSITES IN THE WORLD
约翰·布罗克曼 John Brockman: Awkwardness, confusion, and contradiction are my three best friends
P: Your friend James Lee Byars believed, that to arrive at a satisfactory plateau of knowledge it was pure folly to go to Widener Library at Harvard and read six million books. Instead, he planned to lock the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room and have them ask one another the questions they'd been asking themselves. The expected result—in theory—was to be a synthesis of all thought. But it didn't work out that way. Byars did identify his 100 most brilliant minds and phoned each of them. The result: 70 hung up on him.
You created the website Edge.org which is very similar to Byars’s idea. Why did you succeed?
B: I had gotten to know the founders of the major internet companies when they were starting out and before they became successful. The founders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesla, have all attended my annual "Billionaires' Dinner." I am, according to software visionary and father of hypertext Ted Nelson, "the shadowy figure at the top of the cyber-food chain."
Ten years after the late artist-philosopher James Lee’s informed failure, I created an informal gathering of intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms and elsewhere. Reality Club members presented their work with the understanding that they would be challenged. The hallmark of The Reality Club was rigorous and sometimes impolite (but not ad hominem) discourse. The motto of the Club was inspired by James Lee:
To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
This Idea is Brilliant
On Sale Now! [1.16.18]
CONTENTS: author of The God Delusion RICHARD DAWKINS on using animals’ “Genetic Book of the Dead” to reconstruct ecological history; MacArthur Fellow REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN on “scientific realism,” the idea that scientific theories explain phenomena beyond what we can see and touch; author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics CARLO ROVELLI on “relative information,” which governs the physical world around us; theoretical physicist LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS on the hidden blessings of “uncertainty”; cognitive scientist and author of The Language Instinct STEVEN PINKER on “The Second Law of Thermodynamics”; biogerontologist AUBREY DE GREY on why “maladaptive traits” have been conserved evolutionarily; musician BRIAN ENO on “confirmation bias” in the internet age; Man Booker-winning author of Atonement IAN MCEWAN on the “Navier-Stokes Equations,” which govern everything from weather prediction to aircraft design and blood flow; plus pieces from RICHARD THALER, JARED DIAMOND, NICHOLAS CARR, JANNA LEVIN, LISA RANDALL, KEVIN KELLY, DANIEL COLEMAN, FRANK WILCZEK, RORY SUTHERLAND, NINA JABLONSKI, MARTIN REES, ALISON GOPNIK, and many, many others.
The State of Informed Bewilderment
[1.3.18]
In relation to the Internet and the changes it has already brought in our society, my feeling is that although we don’t know really where it’s heading because it’s too early in the change, we’ve had one stroke of luck. The stroke of luck was that, as a species, we’ve conducted this experiment once before. We’re living through a transformation of our information environment. This happened once before, and we know quite a lot about it. It was kicked off in 1455 by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of printing by movable type.
In the centuries that followed, that invention not only transformed humanity’s information environment, it also led to colossal changes in society and the world. You could say that what Gutenberg kicked off was a world in which we were all born. Even now, it’s the world in which most of us were shaped. That’s changing for younger generations, but that’s the case for people like me.
JOHN NAUGHTON is a senior research fellow at Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. He is an Internet columnist for the London Observer, and author of From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg. John Naughton's Edge Bio page
Coalitional Instincts
[11.22.17]
A daunting new augmented reality was neurally kindled, overlying the older individual one. It is important to realize that this reality is constructed by and runs on our coalitional programs and has no independent existence. You are a member of a coalition only if someone (such as you) interprets you as being one, and you are not if no one does. We project coalitions onto everything, even where they have no place, such as in science. We are identity-crazed....
JOHN TOOBY is the founder of the field of Evolutionary Psychology, co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. John Tooby's Edge Bio Page
Introduction
One of the joys of Edge, the incredible wealth of important ideas from leading thinkers, also presents a unique challenge. The 2017 Edge Question (What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to Be More Widely Known?), published this past January, consists of essays by 206 contributors comprising a manuscript of 143,000 words. It would be completely understandable for readers to have missed or skimmed over John Tooby’s seminal essay, “Coalitional Instincts.” What Tooby, the father of Evolutionary Psychology, has to say about coalitions, identity, tribalism, could just as well be on the front pages of today's leading newspapers. We are pleased to present "Coalition Instincts" with the hopes that it sparks a wide science-based conversation.
—John Brockman
Editor, Edge
"A Difference That Makes a Difference"
[11.22.17]
Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like a picture? Is it iconic in some way? Does it resemble what it’s about, or is it like a word that refers to what it’s about without resembling it? Are there third, fourth, fifth alternatives? Looking at information in the brain and then trying to trace it back to information in the genes that must be responsible for providing the design of the brain that can then carry information in other senses, you gradually begin to realize that this does tie in with Shannon's information theory. There’s a way of seeing information as "a difference that makes a difference," to quote Donald MacKay and Bateson.
Ever since then, I’ve been trying to articulate, with the help of Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig, just what meaning is, what content is, and ultimately, in terms of biological information and physical information, the information presented in A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Shannon and Weaver. There’s a chapter in my latest book called “What is Information?” I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.
DANIEL C. DENNETT is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author, most recently, of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Daniel C. Dennett's Edge Bio page
Where (or What) Is Today's Frontier?
Danny Hillis's 1991 EDGE Special Project, Reprised [11.22.17]Edge originated in 1980 as The Reality Club. Beginning in September 1990, Edge #1, the first of five printed editions, was privately published to a limited audience. This continued through Edge #5, which was published in April 1992. At that point we switched to an email format and, eventually, in 1997, to the web-based Edge of today.
I ran into Danny Hillis recently, who asked, "Do you remember the postcards I sent out to the Reality Club list in 1991 asking 'Where (or What) Is Today's Frontier?' You published the answers in Edge #3. Wouldn't it be interesting to ask the same question 27 years later?"
On further discussion, we both quickly realized that the postcard format would be a problem because (a) many people have forgotten how to write, and (b) does anybody today know how or where to buy a stamp?
So, here again, in its entirety, is a downloadable PDF of the 16-page Edge #3, with all kinds of interesting material...
• Stephen Jay Gould on eohippus, Kentucky Derby winners, human history, 18th-century castrati, Ted Williams, and Mozart;
• Howard Gardner on the problems he encounters while studying creativity;
• Howard "always ten years ahead of his time" Rheingold on THE WELL, the Internet, virtual reality, and filters;
• Danny Hillis's question "Where (or What) Is Today's Frontier?" with dozens of responses from the Edgies;
• "Deep Desert" on Southwestern ecology and bovine imperialism;
• Alan Guth, the father of inflationary theory, on "What's new in the universe"
And, of course, the Edgies' responses to Danny Hillis's question, including his own prescient and optimistic response:
"I finally realized that the frontier had been sitting in my office all along—on the other side of the computer screen. That's basically where the cowboys are today. First, fortunes are being made and lost; second, it's where new law is being made, and third, new territories are up for grabs for anyone with the courage and imagination to take them. I didn't think this way when the project started."
So, here we are 27 years later: Where (or what) is today's frontier?
—John Brockman
Editor, Edge
The Human Strategy
[10.30.17]
The idea of a credit assignment function, reinforcing “neurons” that work, is the core of current AI. And if you make those little neurons that get reinforced smarter, the AI gets smarter. So, what would happen if the neurons were people? People have lots of capabilities; they know lots of things about the world; they can perceive things in a human way. What would happen if you had a network of people where you could reinforce the ones that were helping and maybe discourage the ones that weren't?
That begins to sound like a society or a company. We all live in a human social network. We're reinforced for things that seem to help everybody and discouraged from things that are not appreciated. Culture is something that comes from a sort of human AI, the function of reinforcing the good and penalizing the bad, but applied to humans and human problems. Once you realize that you can take this general framework of AI and create a human AI, the question becomes, what's the right way to do that? Is it a safe idea? Is it completely crazy?
ALEX "SANDY" PENTLAND is a professor at MIT, and director of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs. He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General. He is the author of Social Physics, and Honest Signal. Sandy Pentland's Edge Bio page
We Are in the Presence of a Formidable Creature
[10.13.17]
We Are in the Presence of a Formidable Creature
Artificial intelligence changes science and technology. Clear. But what does it do with society? Engineers, artists and scientists come to an inescapable realization.
By Andrian Kreye, October 13, 2017
[Editor’s Note: Edge was in London once again to continue its ongoing collaboration with The Serpentine Gallery and its “supercurator” Hans Ulrich Obrist. Longtime Edge contributor Andrian Kreye flew in from Munich for the event, and, wearing his hat as Feuilleton editor of the influential German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote the front page lede story in the weekend edition. We are pleased to run the following translated excerpt. —JB]
It is not at all mistaken to look for insight into artificial intelligence by reading the folk tales in 1001 Nights. The writer Adam Thirlwell and the literary scholar Marina Warner, currently the President of the Royal Society of Literature, did just that last week in the great hall of the London City Hall. In the mighty spiral dome overlooking the Thames and Tower Bridge, a few dozen scientists, engineers, artists and writers met to look for coherent images for the artificial intelligence.
Sitting in the architecturally high-quality glistening autumn light, they publicly thought about whether the Oriental fairy-tale genie Djinn, this serviceable wish filler of smokeless fire, was not the perfect symbol for those digital forces, which are currently being unleashed everywhere. Not only could you see the digital flare as a contemporary image for the smoke-free fire, but it also poses the question of the controllability of this rebellious spirit of the bottle. Whoever frees him from his divine imprisonment has no idea of what Djinn's magical powers could do.
Shut Up and Measure
[10.20.17]
What is fascinating to me is that we are now hoping, with modern measurements, to probe the early Universe. In doing so, we’re encountering deep questions about the scientific method and questions about what is fundamental to physics. When we look out on the Universe, we’re looking through this dirty window, literally a dusty window. We look out through dust in our galaxy. And what is that dust? I like to call it nanoplanets, tiny grains of iron and carbon and silicon—all these things that are the matter of our solar system. They’re the very matter that Galileo was looking through when he first glimpsed the Pleiades and the stars beyond the solar system for the first time.
When we look out our telescopes, we never see just what we're looking for. We have to contend with everything in the foreground. And thank goodness for that dust in the foreground, for without it, we would not be here.
Professor BRIAN KEATING is an astrophysicist with the University of California San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave, and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S. patents. Brian Keating's Edge Bio page
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