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From: Timothy Taylor
Date: 4.17.02

Far from recognizing recent putative victories of science as heralding a 'new humanism', I see the potential for a new barbarism. If a literary critic wrote something about 'air atoms' we might laugh; but when an eminent evolutionary biologist uses the word 'metaphysical' as if it meant 'supernatural' or 'mystical' (as one recently did) no one appears to notice. Arts, humanities and philosophy scholars read popular science—if they read it at all—with an already jaded eye. No misuse of language (and consequent betrayal of muddled and unsophisticated thought) comes as a surprise any longer.

One could go off in many directions from the provocative starting point of John Brockman's essay on the 'new humanists', contrasting humanities subjects with 'hard' sciences; experimento-predictive science with historical science (necessity vs. contingency); or post-modernism with various brands of rationalism and Marxism.

Certainly I recognize some of what John diagnoses as frustrating (and worse) in the social sciences—'text-in, text-out' bubbles of inconsequential, content-free activity only blasphemously given the name of scholarship. But we must also recognize that there has been an extraordinary—and often extraordinarily arrogant—underestimation of the complexity of the humanities by some hard scientists who extend themselves across the arts-sciences divide. Personally, I have no doubt that to do moral philosophy well, for instance, requires a longer intellectual training than is typically needed to make advances in, say, plasma physics or genetics. But I also know that some physicists and geneticists are prone not to recognize this. I do not mean to say that what they do is simple-minded (emphatically it is not), simply that some (perhaps much) of it is epistemologically more straight-forward.

There is much that I agree with in what John has said, but points of disagreement too and it will perhaps be useful if we first agree on what things we might mean by humanism. The Oxford English Dictionary gives four general definitions and a fifth, specifically philosophical one. Here they are:

1.Belief in the mere humanity of Christ.

2.The character and quality of being human; devotion to human interests.

3.Any system of thought or action which is concerned with merely human interest (as distinguished from divine), or with those of the human race in general (as distinguished from individual); the 'Religion of Humanity.'

4.Devotion to those studies which promote human culture; literary culture; esp. the system of the Humanists, the study of the Roman and Greek classics which came into vogue at the Renascence.

5.Philos. A pragmatic system of thought . . . which emphasizes that man can only comprehend and investigate what is with the resources of the human mind, and discounts abstract theorizing; so, more generally, implying that technological advance must be guided by awareness of widely understood human needs.

We should note that only in (1) and (3) is an association with atheism explicitly signalled and that Renaissance humanists like Leonardo believed in God (indeed their sense of wonder at the world and their urge to invent and subcreate within it was often felt to be part of discharging human duties that were ultimately divine in origin). However, scientific humanism, as it arose with Darwin in opposition to the dogma of Victorian clerics, is explicitly associated with atheism or agnosticism, and is understood by many to point the way towards a purely scientifically-grounded theory of right action—ethical humanism.

These definitions obviously contain contrastive elements. I take it that John might often be professionally concerned with definition 4, most usually associated with rhetoric, grammar, poetry and a knowledge of the classics—i.e. those things which popular science writing can benefit so much from (and which it sometimes fails to display); I am wondering, however, whether by new humanism John instead means to indicate something that furthers knowledge of humanity more rigorously and lucidly (more scientifically in one use of the word) than American sociology and socio-cultural anthropology currently do (disciplines which, powered by post-modernism and relativism, have all but imploded in some areas). If this is so, then the debate on what a new humanism might be as conducted in and from the US will be rather different to the debate which might be had elsewhere.

The dangers of scientists attempting to become the new humanists are best illustrated by specific examples. For instance, Richard Dawkins' idea of 'memes'—proposed cultural counterparts to genes—has not been adopted in archaeology, precisely the discipline where it should have succeeded had it been useful. It is unsurprising (and no real discredit to him) that a top-notch geneticist does not cut the mustard when it comes to theorizing cultural transmission: after all, Richard Dawkins may have no more training in cultural theory than I have in genetics. A problem arises, however, if people who may know no better think that memes must be a good idea, and interpret the paucity of critical discussion of them as evidence of the acceptance of the concept.

Similar kinds of concerns arise in relation to the psychologist Steven Pinker's formulation of a 'language instinct'. This is not a bad idea in theory, but it is elaborated with—apparently—total disregard for an extensive body of work by Russian, French and German philosophical linguists which has reached very different conclusions. That is to say, whether or not one accepts Pinker's linguistic judgements, his work has come out from a cognitive psychology background into the glare of public attention (and has been widely accepted to be true by the media) without engaging with those humanistic debates of most central relevance to the plausibility or otherwise of his most dramatic claims (as expressed by followers of L.S.Vygotsky, to take one example).

One has to confront the tricky problem that popular science often either preaches to the converted or, when it strays into more 'humanistic' domains, makes an unwitting ass of itself. The US has an excellent tradition of scientists writing for a broader audience, but a scarily growing third of the national population share a metaphysics which cannot accommodate Darwinian evolution, let alone understand what it entails. The rise of Creationism in the US is an unfolding intellectual tragedy that will only be turned around once there is greater respect, among scientists in particular, for the sophistication and unpredictability of human social and cultural formations. This will require a renewed humility in addressing the true complexities of our behavioural well-springs. The prospect of a great nation intellectually split between religious fundamentalism and an equally assertive, dogmatic and unreflectively narrow scientism is not pretty.

The 'human needs' alluded to in definition 5 above may well—in contrast to definition 3—include religion. Historically and prehistorically, they obviously do: viewed in a socially—and biologically-evolutionary perspective, religious beliefs generally (but not without exception) appear to represent adaptive systems which create and mediate cultural values and relationships. This indicates that to be fully human involves more than purely 'rational' existence. We might reflect here on Darwin's own horror of the possibility that the uneducated working classes would outbreed those who were more educated, like himself, even though, by his own survival-of-the-fittest logic, he should have taken a neutral, value-free view. He clearly thought that there was something valuable about humans 'at their best' that extended beyond reproduction. If it could no longer be viewed as a divine spark, then it was something equally transcendent—a quest for enlightenment and truth for its own sake, for example.

A real victory for science would consist not in sweeping other aspects of existence, such as religion, away (not that it has any hope of doing so), but in respectfully deepening understanding of what it is to live and die as a human and observe the universe from that perspective. Many dimensions of non-rational, symbolic or ritual behaviours can, of course, be partially or wholly analysed within a scientific framework, but other aspects will never be amenable to such a thing. There are places where experiment and verification cannot go and we have to observe, interpret, reflect and explain perceived phenomena in a qualitatively different way.

What we should remember, whatever disagreements and convergences this debate reveals, is that no data are untheorized; that theories embody values; and that therefore empirical research can never be wholly objective. In this sense, then, science is already pervaded by humanism—steeped in categories, perceptions and styles of entitation that have a long and distinctive cultural history. Science may be a (the?) most powerful way to answer questions, but both questions and answers are imbued with humane value. What is most important for John to do next is to encourage more people trained in traditionally 'non-scientific' disciplines to present their often highly sophisticated and demanding ideas in a way that enables greater dialogue across the arts-science divide. One day we may be able to just consider the quality and nature of our knowledge—distinguishing only good from bad thinking.

TIMOTHY TAYLOR is an archaeologist at University of Bradford, UK, and author of The Buried Soul. [more....]

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From: Alison Gopnik
Date: 4.17.02

There is another reason why recent scientific advances, and the emergence of the third culture, provide at least some grounds for optimism. One of the arenas where we are making the most scientific progress is in our understanding of the origins of our own knowledge of the world, including the origins of science itself. It increasingly appears that human beings are, by and large, designed to get at the truth about the world. Much of the scientific process seems quite continuous with the ordinary ways that we learn about and make sense of the world, literally from the time we are born. From a scientific point of view, nonscientists ought to be able to follow, reflect on, understand and even emotionally empathize with scientific activity—and the success of popular science suggests that they do. Science provides us with a structured, socially organized way of exercising our innate truth-finding capacities.

The grounds for pessimism stem from the fact that the same capacities that, overall and in the long run, lead us to the truth, can, in some circumstances, lead to characteristic distortions and errors. In much the same way, the visual system does an absolutely remarkable job of getting us accurate information about the external world, but also generates the perceptual illusions you find in any psychology textbook.

Two sources of "cognitive illusion" are particularly relevant to the current culture. One involves cases where our explanatory drive far outstrips the evidence that is available to us. Ironically, the very motivations and emotions that are celebrated by many of the contributors to this discussion, the sense of glory in order and pleasure in explanation, may also be at the root of the continued appeal of magic, superstition and religious belief.

The other, perhaps more serious, problem, concerns the division of labor that is at the heart of the success of modern, socially organized science. The division of labor is itself one of the successful evolutionary devices that allow us to find the truth. By listening to their mothers, each generation of children can jump-start their way to the truth and take advantage of the militia of human investigation that preceded their appearance on the scene. But these mechanisms of authority and deference can easily produce a sort of cognitive software virus, a kind of counterworld in which the conventions take over from the reality—as in the medieval universities or many parts of the "official" humanities today. One of the puzzles of the history of science is why science never really took off in China. After all, China had an elaborate set of social institutions that encouraged and rewarded specialized scholarship, an enormous system of competitive examinations, and detailed mechanisms for establishing authority and passing on knowledge. Maybe the answer is that that social infrastructure, so painfully reminiscent of the contemporary American academic mandarinate, hurt more than it helped. The European intellectuals who started institutions like the Royal Society stayed as far away from the contemporary universities as they could.

Ultimately, though, there are grounds for at least a contingent kind of optimism (contingent, for example, on the fact that nuclear war or global warming don't get us first). In other areas, understanding both our capacities and limitations has led us to increase those capacities and overcome those limitations—the fact that I'm wearing glasses and writing this on a computer is testament to that. As we increasingly understand our learning capacities and limitations we ought, at least in principle, to be able to overcome both the intrinsic and social obstacles. Its just a guess, but I suspect that the program of John's essay will be one way to help solve the social organization problem. By providing social institutions that bridge and bypass the divisions of labor we ought to both be able to provide the right links between science and nonscientists, and to prevent the sort of internal wheel-spinning we see in so many parts of the "humanities" and too many parts of the sciences themselves.

ALISON GOPNIK is a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn. [more....]

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From: Carlo Rovelli
Date: 4.17.02

Once more, John Brockman reclaims the cultural centrality of scientific thinking in our civilization. John tells us that a new "intellectual whole", a fresh reading of the world, is being developed by advancing contemporary science. This is the central role, recalls John, science had in the Renaissance that opened the modern age. Scientists today, or at least some scientists today, are the new humanists, searching and offering a powerful evolving, complex and articulated reading of the world, which is the core of today's culture.

I'd like to tell a story in this regard. It is a story that offers a perspective, and has a moral.

Many and many centuries ago, a young king of a small mountain kingdom had the wisest of all men as his teacher. The teacher taught the young king that knowledge is the source of civilization. And that rational scientific thinking is the way to knowledge. He nurtured in the king the immense dream of a novel world civilization, founded on knowledge. The king went to war. In his army, he did not have just soldiers, he had scientists, mathematicians, natural philosophers, engineers, writers, historians. People were amazed by the power of this army, that seemed capable, at times, to bend the world at his will. A city on a small island was considered impregnable: the scientists and engineers build a novel stretch of land to reach the island and took the city. The king conquered an immense empire, all the way to India. His life was brief and his empire fell rapidly apart. But his companions and the descendants of his companions inherited pieces of the empire, became wise kings and preserved the faith in knowledge. They built a great library to guard and propagate knowledge, and they keenly nurtured science. And science and knowledge developed astonishingly. The greatest scientist of all times lived then, medicine was born, optics was born, astronomy was born, physics was born, the basic book with the grammar of science, which we have all studied in school, was written in those times ... a way of enquiring the world had been found... With it, new huge ships were built, commerce flourished, new lands were reached, industries developed, people were healed, and the city of the wise king was diverse, prosperous, tolerant, intellectually vibrant and projected towards the future...

This is not a fairy tale. It is the true story of our civilization. The number of centuries ago is precisely twenty three. The young king is of course Alexander the Great. His wise teacher was Aristotle. The kings that continued his cultural politics are the Ptolemies in Alexandria. The great scientist is Archimedes. The book with the basic grammar of science we all have studied is Euclid's Elements, which created geometry. This is our deep heritage.

But did this inheritance continue across the centuries? No. Civilization fell back to obscurantism. The Romans failed to understand it. The story goes that they murdered Archimedes. Certainly they did not understand earlier theoretical science anymore. Time went on, things got worse and worse. The great library of Alexandria was burned down. Irrational and religious thinking prevailed. The kind of thinking whose effects we can well contemplate today in its very central nest: Jerusalem...

Eighteen century later, European men, full of awe and respect, slowly started to search and translate ancient books, where remaining bits of the old knowledge were still present, copied over and over by innumerable hidden and devoted hands. It took sometime, but soon some of these men, courageously, decided not to just rediscover, but to start the path again, push the path ahead. Galileo Galilei was one of these, well aware, as is clear in his writings, that he was doing again, eighteen centuries later, what had begun in ancient times. The path of rational knowledge had restarted. To a large extent, the modern world exists thanks to cumulated rational knowledge: the Greeks' recipe has worked.

Why tell this story? For various reasons. One is to remember that when we teach, say, elementary physics, we are not just training bored students to technical problem solving. We are telling them the story of one of the most extraordinary of the human adventures, the successful paths to knowledge. This is the story of human intelligence used at its best, with advantages for anyone of us. We are teaching the ways of the path to knowledge in our species, nothing less. The second reason is that I do not think Plato or Kant, or Wittgenstein, or so much of western philosophy, could be comprehensible, without the full understanding of the mathematics and the science of their times. And so many are the cultural misreadings of the historians who failed to understand the relevant mathematics and science (on this, and on others of the ideas presented here, see Lucio Russo's La Rivoluzione Dimenticata, Feltrinelli).

But the main reason for keeping this story in mind is that the Greeks had the far reaching intuition of the identity of civilization, knowledge, and rational thinking: but the they eventually lost. It took humanity eighteen centuries to restart the experiment. The path was lost once, and could be lost, in larger or smaller part, again. That we stay this direction is far from being granted.

We are certainly far away from obscurantism. But there are also signs of reaction against scientific thinking, and John's optimistic essay is also a warning against these. There are heavy signs of irrationalism all other the planet, and also in the words of our very top leaders. Our guarantee against obscurantism is not democracy alone: peoples have often voted into power forces that openly adhered to irrationalism such as the Nazis, or some current governments. Our guarantee against obscurantism is the widespread recognition of the vital and clear force of rational scientific thinking. This can help us finding a better world, if irrationalism (or the thirst of power and wealth concentration of our political leaderships) don't drive us down.

When I talk with cultivated people that happily claim they know nothing about math and science, I get even more scared than when powerful people say they do not read books. The control might fall in the hands of people that have no understanding of the basics of our understanding of the world, of our capacity of getting to correct answers and correct predictions.

There is much that is not science and that we want to defend around us. This does not change the core of John's thesis, that scientific thinking is at the core of our knowledge based civilization. We can add to this our thirsty belief in justice; our faith in dreams; our deep awareness of the emptiness of life; or our faith in humanity as a value; our desire of beauty; our joy in talking to all objects with a song; our sense of the mystery; and anything else that the wonders of the human adventure have given us. Nothing of this is challenged by science or challenges science. To the very contrary. The scientific quest for knowledge is deeply emotional in its ways and motivations. But if we resist it, we resist reality. Reality, however complex and unknowledgeable in its deepness, is there, and fights back. This is why rational scientific thinking is stronger. Whenever science has an answer to a well posed question, this answer is, at present, by far the best available answer.

More than that, science is intrinsically capable of multiplying well posed questions. And in this way it leads us continuously to unexpected new realms. The intensity with which this is happening in the last decades is wonderful. Yes, I agree with John that we are in a moment of splendid explosion. Science has opened new realms that no unrealist could ever dream of. Myself, I work in science because I believe in dreams. Science offers such magical dreams, so much more colored and so much more real than the tenuous dream called everyday's reality.

CARLO ROVELLI is a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Theorique in Marseille, France. [more....]

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From: Robert R. Provine
Date: 4.17.02

New Humanist Warriors

While reading "The New Humanists", I found myself mostly nodding in agreement. After all, Brockman is preaching to the choir. What's not to like? It's difficult to argue with scientific flag and motherhood statements. It's obvious that the rest of the world should think and act more like us. Most scientists use empirical methods to seek that which is deep, elegant, and true, using experimental methods to settle disputes and reject error. The power of good science is that the method is so effective that it transcends mediocre practitioners. Like penicillin, it works despite who dispenses it. Many of the New Humanist values have already gained a foothold in Western society, with the power of technology and medicine converting many skeptics. I was not sure whether to treat the essay as a manifesto, progress report, self-congratulation, or declaration of victory—it's clearly too late in the game for a call to action. Brockman's 1992 essay, "The Emerging Third Culture", had more work to do.

I direct attention to a topic neglected in this new essay, the scientist/writer warriors of his New Humanism who are to enlighten, entertain, and change the world. Writing by these Third Culture intellectuals has a personal cost, scientific productivity. (The financial costs were nicely solved by the development of a literary niche.) Few, if any, Nobelists and Nobel class scientists write books, at least while occupied at the lab bench and in hot pursuit of the Prize. The 24/7 schedule of cutting-edge science leaves little time for writing, let alone book writing. Unless scientist/writers are highly efficient, they may become the handmaidens (handbutlers?) of this enterprise, not its leaders. Research reports in refereed journals are the preferred publication form of scientists. And grant writing is necessary to pay laboratory bills and keep university administrators at bay.

While perched before the word processor, a scientist is neither turning the crank on the research machine nor bringing in research dollars, but is performing an important service. Books and key reviews advance the scientific enterprise, especially in framing issues, organizing scattered material, establishing new lines of endeavor, and, if directed to a broad audience, educating the public who finance the research. A book does this more effectively than shorter, more dispersed journal articles that may never reach critical mass. However, the act of writing also benefits the scientist. Text is crystallized thought, and the act of writing, especially writing in the long-form of a book, forces intellectual discipline. Writing is the act of learning what it is that you have to say. Blocking may reveal the terrible truth that you are confused and need to rethink what you are trying to do. Writing goes beyond reporting and is an active tool in intellectual and scientific activity. It's unfortunate that the fast pace of catch-as-catch-can modern science makes it difficult for science stories to be told by those who can tell them best, the scientists who are doing the work and love what they are doing.

ROBERT R. PROVINE is a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. [more....].

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From: Steven Johnson
Date: 4.15.02

John, I read this—and the responses—with great interest, as I do everything that gets published on Edge. As others have suggested, the site itself is the finest example of the phenomenon you describe in the essay. Kudos on both.

I think Nicholas Humphrey may have a point when he says that "you've already won." One brief piece of anecdotal evidence: I attended a dinner party last weekend that was populated entirely by people who had spent their undergraduate—and in some cases graduate—years in the trenches of post-modernist theory. These were all people, like me, who had sworn allegiance to Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, et al. in their early twenties. (A number were Semiotics majors with me at Brown.) Any science courses we'd taken in those days we took in order to archly deconstruct the underlying "paradigm of research", or expose one of any number of "centrisms" lurking behind the scientific text and its illusory claims of empirical truth.

What struck me over dinner, though, was how readily the conversation drifted—without me pushing it along—to precisely the realm that you describe in the New Humanists, largely focused around brain issues. None of these people had returned to grad school in neuroscience, mind you, but they were all clearly versed in, and fascinated by, the latest news from the brain sciences: they talked casually about neurotransmitters and "other-mindedness"; they leaned readily on evolutionary psychological explanations for the behavior they were discussing; they talked about the role of the "god spot" in the evolution of religious belief. There wasn't a scarequote or a relativist aside in the entire conversation. I couldn't help think that if any one of them had made a comparable argument ten or fifteen years ago they would have been heckled out of the room.

I don't think my dinner survey was anomalous. It seems to me that the most interesting work right now is work that tries to bridge the two worlds, that looks for connections rather than divisions. I think that's what Wilson was proposing in Consilience: not the annexing of the humanities by the sciences, but a kind of conceptual bridge-building. In fact, I would say that the most consilient work today has come from folks trained as cultural critics—books like Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire with its mix of Nietzsche and Dawkins, or Manuel De Landa's 1000 Years of Non-Linear History with its unique combination of Deleuze and chaos theory.

I suspect there are other bridges to build in the coming years, but the traffic along those bridges will have to be two-way for the interaction to pay off. Obviously, the post-modernists have made a lot of noise trashing the empirical claims of sciences, but if you tune out a lot of that bombast, there's quite a bit in the structuralist and post-structuralist tradition that resonates with new developments in the sciences. To name just a few: the underlying premise of deconstruction—that our systems of thought are fundamentally shaped and limited by the structure of language—resonates with many chapters of a book like The Language Instinct. (I tried to persuade Pinker of this when I interviewed him years ago for Feed.) The postmodern assumption of a "constructed reality" dovetails nicely with the idea of consciousness as a kind of artificial theater, and not a direct apprehension of things in themselves. Semiotics and structuralism both began with Levi-Strauss' research into universal mythology, which obviously has deep connections to the project of evolutionary psychology.

So it seems to me that there are a number of productive avenues that scientists can explore by visiting the world of the humanities—and not just vice versa. I hope more of that exploration can happen on Edge—there's really no better forum for it.

STEVEN JOHNSON, co-founder of Feed, a pioneering Web publication, is the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. [more....]

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From: Lee Smolin
Date: 4.15.02

To my mind what is significant about the idea of a Third Culture and a New Humanism has little to do with a split between academic humanists and scientists. That was the old First/Second culture debate, and there is no need to rehash it. The point I think John is making, and the point that I think is worth discussing is the extent to which that old split has been transcended by the work of some scientists and humanists over the last few decades. I believe that it has, and the reason is that there has been a turn in the kind of questions people are asking across a broad range of fields, and—even more importantly—there has been a shift in what kinds of answers scientists, social scientist and humanists have been searching for in their work. This shift, which I will characterize in a moment, is what characterizes the Third Culture and New Humanism, and it is also why these movements are able to resolve the old disputes between First and Second Culture scientists and humanists.

Thus, what Third Culture and New Humanist intellectuals have to offer society is far more than just being in touch with science. They represent the vanguard of a broad intellectual movement that already has representatives in diverse fields of the sciences, social sciences and humanities.

I think the deepest characterization of this new movement is epistemological, because it is about the kinds of questions people are asking and the kinds of answers they are searching for. It is indicated by the emergence of new styles of explanation which reject the notion of an eternal "ultimate reality" perceived by God alone in favor of more rational and accessible styles of explanations. The old style explanation relies on the hypothesis that behind the ever changing appearances there is an "ultimate reality" that is eternal and unchanging. This eternal reality may be God, it may be eternal principles of justice or aesthetics, or it may be the ultimate laws of nature. The new style of explanation rejects such ideas as being in the end little different from mysticism, as the alleged "ultimate reality" is unknown and unknowable. As pointed out by C. S. Peirce, any explanation that rests on an appeal to the existence of ultimate and unchanging eternal laws of nature is fundamentally irrational, because there can be no further explanation of why those laws of nature, rather than some others, hold. Such an explanation is logically no different than an appeal to "the mind of God."

The new style of explanation rejects the Platonic myth of an eternal realm of true ideas in favor of the idea that knowledge has no meaning apart from what humans beings, as part of the natural world, can perceive and agree on. It also rejects the transcendent fantasies according to which scientist used to picture themselves outside of reality and outside of any society, in the place of God, surveying all that exists without being a part of it. Instead, many scientists are now happy to see ourselves as individuals who work inside of communities of living beings, who seek knowledge by sharing their observations and debating their ideas.

At the same time, this new style of explanation is neither relativist nor irrational. It believes that there is a truth to things, and that human beings are capable of finding it. It is just rejects as irrational mythology the idea that truth is possible because of the existence of an imagined platonic realm of eternal, absolute ideas. Instead, this new movement grounds the notion and possibility of truth on the ability human beings have to argue rationally and in good faith from shared evidence and, by doing so, to arrive at agreement. To accept this is to accept also the notion that rationality is situated and pluralistic. By accepting that there will be things that appear differently from different viewpoints, we strengthen the importance of those things that we find we can agree on.

A contributing factor to this shift is that our cosmological picture has changed drastically, in a way that makes the search for an eternal "ultimate reality" incoherent. Relativity and quantum theory tell us that science must be based on relational quantities, that have to do with relationships between things in the universe, and that no appeal to anything transcend or eternal or otherwise outside the universe is possible, or even meaningful. Observations tell us that we live in a young universe, that was born a relatively short time ago, and has been evolving ever since. It is far from clear what eternal laws of physics can mean, when the universe itself is only a few billion years old.

An aspect of this is the attitude towards reductionism. Everyone can agree that when something is made of parts it is of course useful to explain it in terms of its parts. This is fine but the problem is that there is a natural limitation to how far such a reductionist explanation can be pushed. When it succeeds, reductionism must lead to an explanation in terms of some set of elementary particles and forces. But then there is a problem, because if the elementary particles are truly fundamental their properties cannot be explained by a further appeal to reductionism. So the question of why these fundamental particles and laws, and not others, must be answered in some way that is not itself reductionist. So if we truly want a rational understanding of why things are as they are, and not otherwise, we must follow the path of reductionism till we find out what the fundamental parts are, but after this we must find new, non reductionist modes of explanation.

Once a science reaches the point where naive reductionism can take us no further, there are three moves one can make. The first is of course to deny the existence of a crisis with reductionism and continue in a hopeless search for the eternal "ultimate reality". Unfortunately, this characterizes some, but by no means all, recent work in fundamental physics. Physicists who align themselves with the "many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, "eternal inflation" or who believe that theoretical physics is about to end with the discovery of "M theory" are operating from what may be called a "nostalgia for the absolute." There are similar, nostalgic movements in other fields.

The second response is what can be called the postmodernist move. This begins by denying the use of reductionism and the importance of rational understandings altogether. Truth is held to be nothing but a social construction, and a thorough going relativism is embraced. This is even worse than the nostalgic response, because it undermines the very reasons for the crisis, and leaves us suspended in an impotent haze from within which we cannot even remember how useful rational thought has been for improving our world, politically, scientifically and humanly. Even more than that, the postmodern ideology sabotages the possibility for democracy, because it denies the possibility that people in different situations, with different points of view, can argue rationally on the basis of shared evidence and reach agreement and mutual understanding.

There is however, a third, progressive response to the crisis in the search for "ultimate reality." This is to accept the strengths and limitations of reductionism and to seek to go beyond it to a more comprehensive and powerful kind of explanation. Evolution by natural selection is a paradigmatic example of such a theory: it is consistent with reductionism, but transcends it in being ultimately historical and allowing causation to go both ways-from the more to less complex, and the reverse. By attributing order to self-organization rather than design from the outside, evolution by natural selection offers an essentially rational mode of understanding that avoids any mystical appeal to eternal "ultimate causes of things."

Another characteristic of such explanations is that they may be applied to whole systems, which contain both all their causes and all their observers. Such whole systems include the universe, societies and ecologies. This implies that there is no useful view from outside the system, instead description and explanation are both pluralistic and relational, because they must take into account that any observer is situated inside the system. Thus, rather than denying objectivity, this kind of approach rationalizes it, by rooting objectivity in what may be observed from many, distinct view points, rather than in a mythical appeal to an "ultimate reality or an imaginary viewpoint from outside the system. This makes possible both science—that is knowledge without appeal to authority—and democracy in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society.

This new kind of explanation characterizes much of modern biology, as well as recent approaches to complex and self-organized systems, whether economic, sociological, physical or biological. Into this category also goes new approaches to the foundations of quantum mechanics, which have been called relational quantum theory and new approaches to explanation in cosmology, such as cosmological natural selection, the notion of internal observables, and varying speed of light cosmologies.

I believe that what John has called the Third Culture and the New Humanism is ultimately rooted in this pluralistic, relational approach to knowledge. It characterizes many (although of course not all) of the thinkers that were interviewed in the Third Culture book. But the divide between the older, absolutes-seeking styles of thought and the newer, pluralistic and embodied, relational approach does not run cleanly between the sciences and the humanities. Many of the key debates now animating science are between specialists whose philosophical predilections put them on either side of this divide. The debates between many worlds and relational approaches to quantum mechanics or between string theorists and loop quantum gravity theorists clearly reflect this larger debate. So do the debates in evolutionary theory about the level and mechanisms of natural selection and the debates among computer scientists concerning the possibility of strong artificial intelligence. At the same time there are artists, philosophers, scholars, architects and legal theorists whose work is an exploration of the implications of the new attitude towards knowledge. Among them one can mention legal theorists such as Roberto Unger and Drucilla Cornell and artists and writers as diverse as Brian Eno and Pico Iyer.

Finally, it must of course be mentioned that what I have called a new approach to knowledge has very old roots. The 17th Century philosopher Leibniz was keenly aware that the world is a system of relations and the American pragmatists such as Peirce were already a century ago confronting the implications of Darwinism for epistemology and philosophy in general. (Indeed, the simplest way to divide Old from New Humanists is to ask whether their writing shows an awareness of how radically Darwinian evolution changes the background for doing new work in philosophy.) But Leibnizs worldview was to a large extent put aside in favor of Newtonian physics, until it was revived in the 20th Century, while the pragmatists have not had the influence of the deconstructionists in the American academy. When graduate students in the humanities embrace Peirce and Dewey, rather than Foucault and Derrida, and when they read Darwin rather than Hegel, we will be able to say that the New Humanism has come of age.

LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist and a founding member at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo Canada. And author of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. [more....]

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From: Jaron Lanier
Date: 4.15.02

Bravo, John!

You are playing a vital role in moving the sciences beyond a defensive posture in response to turf attacks from the "postmodernists" and other leeches on the academies. You celebrate science and technology as our most pragmatic expressions of optimism.

I wonder, though, if it's enough to merely point out how hopelessly lost those encrusted arts and humanities intellectuals have become to their petty arms races of cynicism. If we scientists and technologists are to be the new humanists, we must recognize that there are questions that must be addressed by any thinking person which do not lie within our established methods and dialogs. Indeed your edge.org website has provided one of the few forums where scientists can exchange ideas about some of these questions.

Maybe there's a community of scientists who have become the "new humanists", but that isn't good enough.

We "technical people" must either learn to be able to talk about certain things with a greater sensitivity, for a larger popular audience with needs that might seem extraordinary to many of us, or we will continue to cede much influence by default to whoever else is more willing to rise to the occasion.

While "postmodern" academics and "2nd culture" celebrity figures are perhaps the most insufferable enemies of science, they are certainly not the most dangerous. Even as we are beginning to peer at biology's most essential foundations for the first time, we find ourselves in a situation in which vast portions of the educated population have turned against the project of science in favor of pop alternatives that are usually billed as being more "spiritual". These range from the merely silly (such as astrology) to the archaic, mean, and often violent religious orthodoxies which seem to be gaining power within many of the world's religious traditions at the same time.

What is it that drives vast numbers of people into superstition, and the inevitable exploitation that follows from it? What is it, for instance, that has made medicine informed by science (often derided as being merely "Western", or "Allopathic") so unattractive to so many smart people, when it is utterly clear that it has been an overwhelming success?

Perhaps the science culture elite has not sufficiently appreciated the task it must take on if it is to be its own advocate. Postmodern critics of science are mostly merely ridiculous, while the mainstream enemies of science are something much worse: They are winning.

What does that word "spirituality" mean? Let me propose a definition: One's spirituality is the range of one's emotional relationships to those questions which cannot be answered. Scientists and technologists naturally gravitate away from such questions. "What happens when you die?", for instance. Of what we cannot speak we remain silent. We have made peace with the big questions every child asks by finding the limits to our abilities to answer them.

Many of us have grown comfortable with a few familiar and eternal splotches of ignorance, even though they are centrally placed in our fields of view, because there have been compensations for our disappointments. We're delighted that the universe can be understood so well in so many ways, and specifically that we've been able to make personal contributions to that understanding. We're often enchanted with the beauty we see in nature; beauty that's harder for non-specialized people to appreciate. Some among us have even found faith of one sort or another, but usually only faith which is precisely coincident with those splotches of ignorance.

But what we forget is that many people, probably most, haven't had life experiences which lubricate such intellectual bargains. Most people are not comfortable with accepting a little unfortunately-placed ignorance, or perhaps uncertainty leading to only rigorously bounded zones of faith, in exchange for robust specialized knowledge in other areas. There is every reason in the world to ridicule stupid elitist cultural figures who use trendy pessimisms as a cover for narcissism. Yes, please, let's have fun with them. But that approach won't do much for the hugely larger number of people who suffer from sincere anxiety about the unanswerable big questions.

I'd like to focus on one particular cultural pathway which I believe is driving much of the public away from the sciences, because some members of the edge.com community are central to it. It goes like this: A scientist or technologist is sought out by the media because she is articulate about life beyond the lab. She appears on TV talking about items with human interest using the intellectual framework of her research. Suppose she likes to think in the terms of artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, or some of the other intellectual frameworks which refute the "specialness" of people in order to clarify investigations. An idea arising from such a framework which might serve a purpose in the lab often turns out to fall flat out in the open environment. For instance, if she's an artificial intelligence researcher, she might in passing wonder if a lonely, childless couples could raise a robotic child for comfort in the future. This was an idea in a popular science fiction movie recently, but was also espoused as a reasonable and realistic eventuality by an MIT scientist on National Public Radio.

Within the informed scientific and technological community, it's possible to have a nuanced debate about such a remark. It's possible to ask if the scale of complexity in a real child can really be approximated by a digital device anytime in the relevantly near future. One might point out that even if the hardware gets vast and fast enough, we don't seem to be able to write stable giant programs, so some unforeseen advances would at a minimum be required on the software front.

But that's not what happens out in the wide world of non-scientists. "Soft", or "spiritual" people, for instance, are often disturbed and become more likely to cancel doctors' appointments in favor of aromatherapy sessions. If scientists think robots and children are the same, then a pox on them! When the artificial intelligence researcher equated, even in a very narrow sense, information systems and human beings, she inadvertently answered some of the big questions of childhood in a particular way. I fear the message ends up being heard as something like, "Not only is there no soul, no afterlife, no nothing magical about you at all, but I'm an elite scientist who can see into your circuitry and make another thing like you, thus making you in a fundamental way subordinate to me."