Edge in the News

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/brockman_next09/NS_WhatNext.pdf [6.8.09]

Fallout from the amazing advance in neuroscience dominates this fascinating foray into the future

By Amanda Gefter

FOR PROPHETIC visions of the future, some people turn to horoscopes or fortune tellers. But if you really want to know what the future holds, ask a scientist.

Not just a renowned, seasoned scientist, but a fresh mind, someone who is asking themselves the questions that will define the next generation of scientific thought.

That's precisely what Max Brockman has done in this captivating collection of essays, written by "rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones".

The result is a medley of big ideas on topics ranging from cosmology and climate change, to morality and cognitive enhancement.

The collection is diverse, but one theme resounds: when it comes to the human race, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We owe our evolutionary success to our unique modes of social behaviour.

Social species


In their essay "Out of our minds", journalist Vanessa Woods and anthropologist Brian Hare suggest that it wasn't intelligence that led to social behaviour, but rather social behaviour that paved the way for the evolution of human intelligence. "Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first," they write.

We are a social species, and we have our brains to thank. As Harvard University neuroscientist Jason Mitchell writes: "The most dramatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess ofindividual minds, but the ability to harness that power across many individuals."

Language allows us to do this in an unprecedented way — it serves as a vehicle for transferring one's own mental states into another's mind. Lera Boroditsky — a professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford University — has an interesting piece about the ways in which our native language shapes the way we think about such basic categories as space, time and colour. ...

KOREA TIMES [4.9.09]


Translated from English to Korean by Jang Seok-bong and Kim Dae-yeon; Galleon; 563pp., 19,800 won

From global warming to economic crises, things seem to be turning worse. At this time of pessimism prevailing over optimism, the world needs some antidotes to this epidemic of negative views. But what's out there to be positive about?

This is the question that the author asked 160 scholars and scientific thinkers. John Brockman, the founder of Edge, the influential online salon, complied their answers in this book.

Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Harvard professors and other world class thinkers laid bare their minds about what they're positive about. They are neither blindly nor naively optimistic. Their optimism is based on logical, professional views and insight.

Topics are wide-ranging, from physics and medicine to education and religion or the end of the world. They illustrate diverse sides of the world's future and why they're optimistic about it.

These great thinkers also present tasks that we should tackle to make a better world and this book may help change readers' perceptions of the future of mankind in a more positive way.

-CHO JAE-HYON

THE MAUI NEWS [4.9.09]

While Christians this week observe their holiest week, it might be a good time to contemplate whether their religion is a matter of faith.

There is a faction in the spectrum of Christian believers that persist in seeking to have the government mandate that their beliefs are a science.

Labeled at one time as creationism, it's reincarnated as intelligent design, with proponents insisting that it should be included in public school curriculum alongside Darwin's thesis in "On the Origin of Species."

Numerous court decisions have ruled that efforts to introduce Bible-based curricula on a God-created universe amount to an unconstitutional introduction of state-sponsored religion. Still, advocates continue to pursue mandates to add their "theory" of creation to public school curriculum.

Over the past year, legislative proposals have been offered in Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, South Carolina and Louisiana seeking to require curriculum that challenge the theory of evolution in the interest of critical analysis and academic freedom.

The persistent effort to cast personal faith in God as a science suggests that proponents of intelligent design don't understand what faith is or lack it. Biblical exhortations to faith occurred when Jesus Christ faced disciples who appeal to him to intercede in a storm at sea (Matthew 8:26): "And he saith to them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm."

Over the past century, since Tennessee's Butler Act ban on teaching of evolution as scientific theory was ruled unconstitutional, the effort to inject some other form of Christian belief into science instruction has continued.

It has been a contest of separation of church and state, almost unique to the United States and its Constitution.

Those involved in the church should see it as a separation of faith and scientific theory. To force Christian belief into a science curriculum is to reduce Christianity to a scientific theory that has not been proved.

Intelligent designers claim the theory has been proved, although their hypothesis and proof are a self-fulfilling circular argument. It assumes that complex systems must be designed. The universe is complex, ergo, there must be a designer of the universe.

A counter hypothesis would be that a complex system is a series of anomalies that evolve into patterns occurring as a matter of chance. The universe is a complex system made up of anomalies that have evolved into patterns. Therefore the universe is a matter of chance.

Physicists and cosmologists conduct observations and experiments to test the validity of assumptions about the formation of the universe. To the extent that the evidence of quantum mechanics doesn't align with predictions, even Einstein's general theory of relativity remains theoretical. But a flaw in one theory doesn't prove the validity of another, assuming the Christian God (who also happens to be the Jewish and Islamic God of Abraham) is only theoretical.

Religious belief and science evolved from the same element in the human psyche that needs to explain what we are and what is happening in the world we see. Long before Abraham, tribal shaman were creating versions of gods to explain behavior of plants, animals, Earth's atmosphere, sun, moon and the stars. Forecasts of natural phenomenon were based on observations and those who were more observant of natural cycles were more successful in guiding their tribes.

That is still how science works, even as the technology for observing and analyzing natural phenomena have grown to a high level of sophistication.

It is not how religion works. Faith is a sense of human spirituality that does not rely wholly on empirical observations. It relies on a cognitive element not evident in other animals, but one that is biologically based, according to Marc Hauser, Harvard professor of psychology and biological anthropology ("Moral Minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong," HarperCollins, 2006).

Hauser says a human's moral sense results from a human's ability "to foresee future rewards" in making decisions about how to behave toward another human being. Religious beliefs are not a deciding factor in moral behavior, Hauser said. Rather, he said, moral decisions are based on the ability of the person to forecast an outcome.

Religion and science also forecast outcomes, but one relies on faith, the other on testable concepts.

University of Chicago ecology professor Jerry Coyne cites elements of scientific inquiry include having testable ideas and relying on evidence in testing a theory (www.edge.org "Must we always cater to the faithful when teaching science?")

The presence of God is not a testable idea, unless the faithful accept that God is only a theory.

Proponents of intelligent design appear to be fearful that individuals cannot exercise faith while they engage in scientific study. Matthew 8:26 offers: "Why are ye fearful, Oh ye of little faith?"

* Edwin Tanji is a former city editor of The Maui News. He can be reached at [email protected]. "Haku Mo'olelo," "writing stories," is about stories that are being written or have been written. It appears every Friday.

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW [3.21.09]

Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after­life as “the two cultures,” coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem to read Snow’s book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point appears so evident?

Jack Manning/The New York Times

C. P. Snow in 1969.

It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

In the half-century since, “the two cultures” has become a “bumper-sticker phrase,” asNASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, said in a 2007 speech. (Naturally, as a scientist, Griffin also declared that Snow had hit on an “essential truth.”) And Snow has certainly been enlisted in some unlikely causes. Writing in Newsweek in 1998, Robert Samuelson warned that our inability to take the Y2K computer bug more seriously “may be the ultimate vindication” of Snow’s thesis. (It wasn’t.) Some prominent voices in academia have also refashioned his complaint. “We live in a society, and dare I say a university, where few would admit — and none would admit proudly — to not having read any plays by Shakespeare,” Lawrence Summers proclaimed in his 2001 inaugural address as president of Harvard, adding that “it is all too common and all too acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” This is Snow for the DNA age, complete with a frosty reception from the faculty.

There is nothing wrong with referring to Snow’s idea, of course. His view that education should not be too specialized remains broadly persuasive. But it is misleading to imagine Snow as the eagle-eyed anthropologist of a fractured intelligentsia, rather than an evangelist of our technological future. The deeper point of “The Two Cultures” is not that we have two cultures. It is that science, above all, will keep us prosperous and secure. Snow’s expression of this optimism is dated, yet his thoughts about progress are more relevant today than his cultural typologies.

After all, Snow’s descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he asserts, have “the future in their bones,” while “the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” Scientists, he adds, are morally “the soundest group of intellectuals we have,” while literary ethics are more suspect. Literary culture has “temporary periods” of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the fascist proclivities of Ezra PoundWilliam Butler Yeats and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?” While Snow says those examples are “not to be taken as representative of all writers,” the implication of his partial defense is clear.

Snow’s essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis — who called Snow “intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be” — and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling, who nonetheless thought Snow had produced “a book which is mistaken in a very large way indeed.” Snow’s cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the “possibility of rational discourse.”

Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their generation.” Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that social scientists could form a “third culture.”

So why did Snow think the supposed gulf between the two cultures was such a problem? Because, he argues in the latter half of his essay, it leads many capable minds to ignore science as a vocation, which prevents us from solving the world’s “main issue,” the wealth gap caused by industrialization, which threatens global stability. “This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed . . . most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor,” Snow explains, adding: “It won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t.” (For some reason, Y2K predictions and Snow did not mix well.) Thus Snow, whose service in World War II involved giving scientists overseas assignments, recommends dispatching a corps of technologists to industrialize the third world.

This brings “The Two Cultures” to its ultimate concern, which has less to do with intellectual life than with geopolitics. If the democracies don’t modernize undeveloped countries, Snow argues, “the Communist countries will,” leaving the West “an enclave in a different world.” Only by erasing the gap between the two cultures can we ensure wealth and self-government, he writes, adding, “We have very little time.”

Some of this sounds familiar; for decades we have regarded science as crucial to global competitiveness, an idea invoked as recently as in Barack Obama’s campaign. But in other ways “The Two Cultures” remains irretrievably a cold war document. The path to industrialization that Snow envisions follows W. W. Rostow’s “take-off into sustained growth,” part of 1950s modernization theory holding that all countries could follow the same trajectory of development. The invocation of popular revolution is similarly date-stamped in the era of decolonization, as is the untroubled embrace of ­government-dictated growth. “The scale of the operation is such that it would have to be a national one,” Snow writes. “Private industry, even the biggest private industry, can’t touch it, and in no sense is it a fair business risk.”

This is, I think, why Snow’s diagnosis remains popular while his remedy is ignored. We have spent recent decades convincing ourselves that technological progress occurs in unpredictable entrepreneurial floods, allowing us to surf the waves of creative destruction. In this light, a fussy British technocrat touting a massive government aid project appears distinctly uncool.

Yet “The Two Cultures” actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world — for the better — without a heavy guiding hand. The Industrial Revolution, he writes, occurred “without anyone,” including intellectuals, “noticing what was happening.” But at the same time, he argues that 20th-century progress was being stymied by the indifference of poets and novelists. That’s why he wrote “The Two Cultures.” So which is it? Is science an irrepressible agent of change, or does it need top-down direction?

This question is the aspect of “The Two Cultures” that speaks most directly to us today. Your answer — and many different ones are possible — probably determines how widely and deeply you think we need to spread scientific knowledge. Do we need to produce more scientists and engineers to fight climate change? How should they be deployed? Do we need broader public understanding of the issue to support governmental action? Or do we need something else?

Snow’s own version of this call for action, I believe, finally undercuts his claims. “The Two Cultures” initially asserts the moral distinctiveness of scientists, but ends with a plea for enlisting science to halt the spread of Communism — a concern that was hardly limited to those with a scientific habit of mind. The separateness of his two cultures is a very slippery thing. For all the book’s continuing interest, we should spend less time merely citing “The Two Cultures,” and more time genuinely reconsidering it.

Peter Dizikes is a science journalist based in Boston.

Short takes on three books
AMERICAN SCIENTIST [2.28.09]

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything. Edited by John Brockman. Harper Perennial, $14.95, paper.

...Last year's question, "What have you changed your mind about?," brought a typically brilliant array of brief essays, by turns provocative, playful and profound. Last year's question, "What have you changed your mind about?," brought a typically brilliant array of brief essays, by turns provocative, playful and profound. Brockman has collected them into a volume with the question as its title.

In one of the essays, MIT quantum-mechanical engineer Seth Lloyd describes how his students have given him a new appreciation of technology. In another, mathematicianKeith Devlin explains his growing conviction that human mathematics is peculiar to the human mind. Nature news editor Oliver Morton has abandoned his support for human spaceflight. And journalist Charles Seife, who once assumed that democracy and science shared the same ideals, now believes that the egalitarian and the skeptic are natural opponents.

These contributions are typically only two or three pages long, which makes them compulsively readable. The only disappointment is that there's no discussion among the participants—but that's what the Web site is for.—Greg Ross

Read the full article →

H/PD — Germany [2.19.09]

Entdeckung des menschlichen Gehirns (c) bandolino.no

Sind Wissenschaft und Religion miteinander vereinbar? Nein, sagte der Evolutionsbiologe Jerry Coyne und argumentierte für diese Haltung ausführlich bei Edge.org. Daraufhin entbrannte eine Debatte zwischen amerikanischen Intellektuellen um diese Frage. Der „Neue Atheist" Sam Harris beantwortet sie im folgenden Essay und geht dabei satirisch auf seine Mitdiskutanten ein.

 

Einige Dinge stehen über der Vernunft

Es ist schade, dass Leute wie Jerry Coyne und Daniel Dennett nicht erkennen, wie einfach man Religion und Wissenschaft miteinander vereinbaren kann. Ich verstehe, wie sie ihre fundamentalistische Vernunft geblendet und von tieferen Wahrheiten abgehalten hat. Ich möchte diesen beiden Männern schon lange sagen: „Einige Dinge stehen über der Vernunft. Weit darüber!" Zum Glück hat George Dyson das für mich in einem genialen Essay auf dieser Websitegetan. Er zerstört die intellektuellen Anmaßungen von militanten Atheisten wie Coyne und Dennett auf die eleganteste Art und Weise, die man sich nur vorstellen kann: Indem er einfach den Titel einer Arbeit aus dem 17. Jahrhundert des großen Robert Boyle zitiert. Als ich ein militanter Neo-Rationalist war, hatte ich den tiefgehenden Eindruck, dass sich meine Kollegen und ich in Bezug auf das Design-Argument nicht genügend mit Boyle befasst hatten und darum öffentliche Demütigung riskierten. Nun ist es passiert...

 

Die unsterbliche Magie

Bei einer Kleinigkeit bin ich nicht Dysons Meinung, er war bis jetzt nämlich viel zu bescheiden, wenn es darum geht, die Folgen seiner Argumentation offen zu legen. Er hat natürlich recht festzustellen, dass „Wissenschaft und Religion von Dauer sind". Aber auch die Magie ist von Dauer, George: Afrika ist voll davon. Gibt es eine Auseinandersetzung zwischen der wissenschaftlichen Vernunft und magischen Zaubersprüchen? Gibt es, genauer gesagt, eine Auseinandersetzung zwischen dem Glauben, dass Epilepsie ein Ergebnis ungewöhnlicher Gehirnaktivität ist und dem Glauben, dass es sich dabei um ein Zeichen dämonischer Besessenheit handelt? Dogmatiker wie Coyne und Dennett sind klar dieser Meinung. Sie realisieren im Gegensatz zu Dyson nicht: Je besser man die Neurologie versteht, desto besser versteht - und schätzt - man die Dämonologie. Haben Coyne und Dennett die Arbeiten von erfahrenen Magiern wie Aleister Crowley oder Eliphas Levi gelesen? Darauf würde ich nicht wetten. Fragen Sie sich, wie Geist und Materie in irgendeiner Weise im Konflikt stehen könnten? Antwort: Das können sie nicht. Entschuldigen Sie mich, aber ich finde es peinlich, diese Dinge Leuten erklären zu müssen, die angeblich hoch gebildet sind.

 

Wissenschaftler haben keine Ahnung

Emanuel Derman ermahnt neo-säkulare Militante wie Coyne und Dennett, „nicht länger bei dem Versuch ihre Zeit zu verschwenden, die Gottesidee im Namen der Wissenschaft aufzumischen". Angesichts dieser so umfassenden Dekonstruktion ihrer Arbeit gehe ich davon aus, dass sich Coyne und Dennett für immer verändern werden. Derman erinnert uns mit herausragender Geduld daran, dass Wissenschaftler außerhalb des engen Fokus der wissenschaftlichen Weltsicht keine Autorität besitzen. Kann ein Biologe irgendwelche begründeten Zweifel an der Jungferngeburt Jesu unterhalten? Nein - denn die menschliche Parthenogenese hat überhaupt nichts mit Biologie zu tun. Kann sich ein Physiker eine informierte Meinung über die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Himmelfahrt bilden? Wie könnte er? Die körperliche Translokation in den Himmel erfordert keine Interaktion mit den Naturgewalten. Können entweder ein Biologe oder ein Physiker realistischerweise die kommende Wiederbelebung der Toten bezweifeln? Viele haben es versucht - keinem ist es gelungen. (Bedenken Sie bitte, dass jede Erwähnung von „Entropie" in diesem Zusammenhang bloße Angeberei ist). Wie Derman erkennt, ist es die blankeste Arroganz, die atheistische Wissenschaftler dazu gebracht hat, sich dermaßen zu übernehmen.

 

Attraktive Männer beweisen Schöpfung

Dieser Austausch bei Edge war ein Festmahl für den Verstand! Denken Sie nur an Lisa Randalls bewegenden Bericht über ihre Flugzeugreise in Begleitung eines „entzückenden jungen Schauspielers", der einfach in seinem Herzen wusste, dass unsere Art nicht von affenartigen Vorfahren abstammt, sondern vom biblischen Adam. Ich beschwöre die Leser, sich länger mit diesen Punkten zu befassen, da Randalls Prosa beinahe bis zur Planck-Skala verdichtet ist. Stellen Sie sich nur einmal vor, wie es gewesen sein muss, sich in 30 000 Fuß Höhe in Begleitung eines Mannes zu befinden, der Molekularbiologie auf Hochschulniveau studiert. Nun bedenken Sie, dass dieses Wunderkind sowohl Schauspieler von Beruf ist, als auch ein begeisterter Unterstützer von Barack Obama. Und schließlich machen Sie sich klar, dass dieser Fremde an Ihrer Seite die Evolution für nichts weiter hält als ein bösartiges Stück säkularer Propaganda. Ich kann mir vage vorstellen, wie sich Coyne und Dennett nach Lektüre von Randalls Geschichte bis hierhin gefühlt haben.

 

Logik wird überschätzt

Doch Randall gräbt tiefer:

„Auf Erfahrungen basierende und logisch schlussfolgernde Wissenschaft und Glauben sind zwei völlig verschiedene Methoden, um an die Wahrheit heranzugehen. Sie können einen Widerspruch nur dann feststellen, wenn Ihre Regeln logisch sind. Wenn Sie an die geoffenbarte Wahrheit glauben, dann haben Sie die Regeln verlassen. Es gibt beim besten Willen keinen Widerspruch."

Ich bin zuversichtlich, dass Randalls Abenteuer im Flugzeug einen Wendepunkt markiert in unserem intellektuellen Diskurs. Nicht nur hat sie alle Widersprüche zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion (und Magie, UFO-Kulten, Astrologie, Tarot, Handlesen, etc.) aufgelöst, sie hat auch scheinbar widersprüchliche Religionen miteinander vereinbart. Hindus verehren eine Vielzahl von Göttern; Muslime erkennen nur die Existenz von einem an und sie glauben, dass Polytheismus ein Kapitalvergehen ist. Befinden sich Hinduismus und Islam im Konflikt miteinander? Nur „wenn Ihre Regeln logisch sind". So wie Pfade, die einen Berghang hinaufführen, am Fuße des Berges diskrepant aussehen können, stellen wir fest, sobald wir auf dem Gipfel stehen, dass alle Wege zum selben Ziel geführt haben - so wird es mit jeder Anwendung des menschlichen Verstandes sein! Der Gipfel der Wahrheit erwartet euch, meine Freunde. Wähle einfach deinen Pfad...

 

Schützt religiöse Gefühle

Und doch gibt es mehr zu sagen gegen Leute wie Coyne, Dennett und Dawkins (er ist der Schlimmste!). Patrick Bateson teilt uns mit, dass es „atemberaubend unsensibel" ist, die religiösen Überzeugungen von Menschen zu unterwandern, die jene Überzeugungen als tröstend empfinden. Ich stimme vollkommen zu. Nur ein Beispiel: In Afghanistan und Pakistan ist es nun eine übliche Praxis, kleine Mädchen für das Verbrechen, zur Schule gegangen zu sein, mit Säure zu blenden und zu entstellen. Als ich ein neo-fundamentalistischer rationaler Neo-Atheist war, hatte ich die Angewohnheit, ein solches Verhalten als ein besonders beschämendes Zeichen religiöser Blödheit zu kritisieren. Ich sehe nun ein - verspätet und zu meiner großen Verlegenheit - dass ich nichts wusste von dem Schmerz, den ein frommer muslimischer Mann beim Anblick junger Frauen empfinden könnte, die Lesen lernen. Wer bin ich, um den öffentlichen Ausdruck seines Glaubens zu kritisieren? Bateson hat recht. Der Glaube an die Unfehlbarkeit des heiligen Koran ist eindeutig unverzichtbar für diese angeschlagenen Menschen.

 

Am besten, man redet nicht darüber

Warum kann ein militanter säkularistisch-atheistischer Neo-Dogmatist wie Coyne die nackte Wahrheit nicht erkennen? Es GIBT einfach keinen Konflikt zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft. Und selbst wenn es einen gäbe, so wäre es eine unglaubliche Zeitverschwendung, irgendetwas darüber zu sagen. Lawrence Krauss hat diesen zweiten Punkt jenseits jeden Zweifels etabliert. Gehen sie zurück und lesen sie seinen Aufsatz. Es wird Sie nur fünf Sekunden Zeit kosten. Ich habe ihn 70 Mal runtergelesen und jede Durchsicht bringt frische Einblicke.

Schlussendlich: Ankunft von Kenneth Miller in der Rolle des wahren Gläubigen und Verteidiger seiner Arbeit gegen die unerfahrene Lesung Coynes:

 

Gottes Wille ist unergründlich

„Ich habe keineswegs argumentiert, dass dieser glückliche Zusammenfluss natürlicher Ereignisse und physischer Konstanten die Existenz Gottes irgendwie beweist - nur, dass sie von einer gläubigen Person als mit dem Göttlichen vereinbar verstanden oder gedeutet werden könnte."

Genau so muss man an einen neo-militanten Rationalisten wie Coyne herangehen. Diese Leute sind einfach besessen davon, die beste Erklärung für die Muster zu finden, die wir in der natürlichen Welt beobachten. Aber der Glaube lehrt uns, dass das Beste, leider, oft der Feind des Guten ist. Zum Beispiel fragen Leute wie Coyne, ob die Datenlage, dass Viren zehn Mal so häufig vorkommen wie Tiere und dass ein einziger Virus wie Grippe 500 Millionen menschliche Wesen im 20. Jahrhundert getötet hat (viele von ihnen Kinder), am besten mit Hilfe eines allwissenden, allmächtigen, allguten Gottes erklärt werden kann, der die Menschheit für seine geliebteste Schöpfung hält. Falsche Frage, Coyne! Sehen Sie, die Weisen haben zu fragen gelernt, wie auch Miller, ob es angesichts der Fakten einfach nur möglich ist, dass ein mysteriöser Gott mit einem unergründlichen Willen die Welt erschaffen haben könnte. Natürlich ist es das! Und das Herz frohlockt...

 

Gott mag Schmelzkäse

Natürlich darf man es mit dieser erhabenen Untersuchung nicht zu weit treiben. Manche haben die Frage aufgeworfen, ob es möglich ist, dass ein mysteriöser Gott mit einem unergründlichen Willen nur an Dienstagen arbeitet, oder ob Er besonders auf Schmelzkäse steht. Es besteht kein Zweifel, dass auch solche Offenbarungen möglich sind - und bevorstehen könnten. Aber sie tragen nicht zu Freude, Keuschheit, Homophobie, oder anderen irdischen Werten bei - und darum geht es ja. Männer wie Coyne und Dennett übersehen diese theologischen Nuancen. Tatsächlich darf man befürchten, dass sie geboren wurden, um eben diese Nuancen zu übersehen.

 

Man kann, muss alles glauben

Miller erkennt auf der anderen Seite an, dass jeder Wissenschaftler die Freiheit hat, die Welt so zu sehen, wie er oder sie das möchte: Wenn Francis Collins zum Beispiel glauben möchte, dass der historische Jesus tatsächlich von den Toten auferstanden ist und noch immer in ätherischer Form existiert, was ihn scharfsichtig und der Masturbation gegenüber leicht abneigend macht, dann weichen diese Überzeugungen nicht einmal ein bisschen von seiner Statur als Wissenschaftler ab. Ein Mann wie Dawkins, der vor langer Zeit als strenger Anhänger des biologischen Naturalismus entblößt wurde, mag sich dazu entschließen, solche Dinge nicht zu glauben. Das ist seine Entscheidung. Doch angesichts seiner entschlossenen Leugnung des erstandenen Christus - und, wahrlich, der bloßen Existenz eines liebenden und fürsorglichen Schöpfers - ist Dawkins nicht in der Position, Collins Ansatz zu kritisieren, weil er einfach keinen inneren Einblick hat, wie brüchig die wissenschaftliche Vorstellungskraft werden kann, sobald sie vom christlichen Glauben herausgefordert wird.

 

Der Böse Blick

Miller ist besonders gut darin, die wissenschaftliche Vernunft von jeder anderen Art menschlicher Erkenntnis zu trennen. Es ist von zentraler Bedeutung für den Leser zu verstehen, dass die Wissenschaft ein Gewerbe ist: Was ein Wissenschaftler glaubt, ist bedeutungslos, solange er seine wissenschaftliche Arbeit sauber macht. Das war schon ein Stolperstein für zahlreiche Möchtegern-Intellektuelle, die sich einbilden, dass Wissenschaft etwas mit einem umfassenden Verständnis des Universums zu tun haben könnte, oder dass die Kenntnis der Quantität und Qualität von Belegen vielleicht keine Grenzen kennt. Womöglich wird eine Analogie hilfreich sein: Sagen wir einmal, ein Herzchirurg glaubt, dass Autounfälle nicht von menschlicher Unachtsamkeit, versagenden Bremsen, etc. ausgelöst werden, sondern durch den Bösen Blick. Würde das seine Statur als Arzt verringern? Natürlich nicht - weil Herzchirurgie nichts zu tun hat mit den Indiskretionen zwischen Auto und Fahrer. Wie Miller sagt: „Die wahre Frage lautet, ob die Meinung eines Wissenschaftlers über Gottes Existenz mit seiner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit inkompatibel ist. Das ist sie eindeutig nicht." Ja, das ist so eindeutig wie die aufgehende Sonne. Ich würde nur hinzufügen, dass der Glaube an den Bösen Blick problemlos vereinbar ist mit der modernen Medizin - mit der möglichen Ausnahme der Augenheilkunde. Manche haben dies die „Balkanisierung der Epistemologie" genannt. Ich denke, dass Begriffe wie „Epistemologie" überbewertet sind. Und das denken auch die meisten Amerikaner.

 

Die tiefgründigste Frage

Endlich gelangt Miller zur tiefgründigsten Frage von allen:

„Man kann sich in der Tat die Wissenschaft in jeder Hinsicht zu eigen machen und trotzdem noch eine tiefergehende Frage stellen, eine, für die sich Coyne nicht zu interessieren scheint: Warum funktioniert die Wissenschaft? Warum ist die Welt um uns herum auf eine Weise organisiert, die sie unseren logischen und intellektuellen Kräften zugänglich macht?"

Ich habe mich oft gefragt, warum das Gehen geht. Warum ist die Welt auf eine Weise beschaffen, dass wir auf ihr herumlaufen können? Und warum sollten unserer Fähigkeit, uns derart frei zu bewegen, Grenzen gesetzt sein, wie etwa jene, die uns die höchsten Höhenlagen aufnötigen? Tatsächlich hielt ich dieses Thema meiner doktoralen Disseration für angemessen, wurde jedoch auf grausame Weise durch einen fantasielosen Berater davon abgebracht. Und doch meine ich, geht Millers Frage sogar noch tiefer. Männer wie Coyne und Dennett haben ihre Augen von der Antwort eindeutig abgewandt - eine Antwort, auf die über 90% ihrer am wenigsten gebildeten Nachbarn ohne Probleme gekommen sind: Das Universum ist für die Vernunft erkennbar, weil der Gott Abrahams es so erschaffen hat. Dieser Gott, der einst eine Vorliebe für Menschenopfer an den Tag legte und dessen einzige direkte Kommunikation mit der Menschheit (durch die Bibel, vertreten durch den Heiligen Geist) nicht das geringste wissenschaftliche Verständnis preisgibt, hat uns trotzdem die geistige Fähigkeit eingeflößt, um hierauf seinen wundervollen und Furcht einflößenden Kosmos in wissenschaftlichen Begriffen zu erfassen. Warum die Wissenschaft nun als der größte Agent der Abschwächung religiösen Glaubens in der Welt angesehen worden ist und warum die Wissenschaft von religiösen Menschen in beinahe allen Kontexten als Bedrohung angesehen wurde, das ist eines der letzten Mysterien, die menschlicher Analyse nicht zugänglich sind. Wenn Gott von uns erwartet hätte, dass wir gute und schlechte Gründe, etwas zu glauben, unterscheiden können, so meinte ich oft, hätte er diesen Unterschied für jeden verständlich gemacht.

 

Was nicht passt, ...

Das Universum ist vollkommen und widerspruchsfrei. Was auf einer Ebene der Physik oder Biologie als ein Widerspruch erscheinen kann, wird stets durch höhere vibrierende Energien miteinander vereinbart, oder, wie Miller hervorhebt, durch „Wunder". Wunder, wie man kaum zu erwähnen braucht, sind genau die Art von Ereignissen, die sich dem rationalen Verständis entziehen und die jeden, der ein umfassendes Verständnis der Welt anstrebt, an ihnen zweifeln lassen würde. Das heißt also, wenn Jesus von einer Jungfrau geboren wurde, die Toten auferweckte, selbst von diesen nach einem kurzen Zwischenspiel auferweckt wurde, dann körperlich in den Himmel gefahren wäre und daraufhin von dort oben Juden und Homosexuellen für zwei Jahrtausende ein beständiges Misstrauen gegenüber unterhalten hätte - das wäre genau die Art von Ereignissen mit geringer Wahrscheinlichkeit, von denen Leute wie Coyne, Dennett und Dawkins annehmen würden, dass sie sich niemals zugetragen haben. Das bedeutet, dass die Zweifel von fundamentalistisch-atheistischen, rationalistisch-neo-humanistischen säkularen Militanten die Wunder von Jesu' Wirken tatsächlich plausibler machen, als sie es andernfalls wären. Jerry, Dan, Richard - bitte macht euch darüber einmal Gedanken.

OHMY NEWS — Korea [2.17.09]

"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
 

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Last December, following an annual tradition, the Edge Foundation asked a select group of intellectuals, researchers, artists and visionaries to reply to this brief question. Their answers, totalling 151 contributions and an estimated 107,000 words, are posted online at the Web site of the World Question Center under this year's heading: "What will change everything?"

Since 1998, the Edge Annual Question has been bringing together some of the world's finest minds to reflect on a specific matter chosen for its relevance or thought-provoking potential. It has sometimes implied a bold challenge, like 2000's question, "What is today's most important unreported story?," and at other times the exercise has been more theoretical, like last year's "What have you changed your mind about?" This year, the topic proposed for consideration is about the ultimate breakthrough that shall have a radical and permanent effect on life as we know it.

This collection of answers, which, as did its most recent predecessors, will surely find its way to printed publication in a few months, not only serves as a precise sketch of the current state-of-the-art in future studies; above all, its separate viewpoints and differing emphases converge to weave a consistent panorama of what the near future will very probably look like.

Technological utopia

Everything will change if we work our way up to Kardashev 1. The most optimistic respondents coincided in echoing the prophets of the Singularity, the qualitative leap in technological development that is expected to take us beyond all currently imaginable standards of innovation, productivity, efficiency and affluence.

Bacteria modified to synthesize fuel will boost our energy sustainability while giving the atmosphere a much-needed relief. The mastery of fusion under controlled conditions will supply us with endless clean energy. And with affordable nanoreplication devices in each home, manufacture of any commodity --or even food-- will become a mere pastime. The tenets of economic theory will collapse under this post-scarcity scenario.

Alas, since the Singularity lies by definition beyond the conceivable horizon, it's easier to imagine what dreams we'll fulfill once there than how we're going to reach it. For example, space exploration and colonization are inspiring prospects, and may someday prove indispensable to our survival, but the degree of progress needed for such endeavors still seems unattainable.

Some of the proposed paths toward that goal involve upgrading our computing power to the point where digital intelligence is capable not only of self-awareness and meaningful communication, but also of studying and improving itself in an accelerating feedback loop that will make it truly superhuman.

There is already a distributed community of millions of individual computers that can provide the physical infrastructure for the nascent AI. The current trend in semantic Web is toward enabling the machine to transcend the mere storage and processing of information and advance towards recognizing and making sense of it. A synthetic brain, encompassing the whole world, aided by our progress in mathematics and thinking at the quantum level, won't be too far from meeting our definition of omnisapience.

New life

Everything will change if life as we know it loses its traditional connotation. A sizable portion of the academics consulted by the Edge Foundation speculated on the possibilities open to synthetic genomics, astrobiology and neuroscience. Each of these holds the key to bypassing the barriers imposed upon us by the contingencies of evolution.

Genomic medicine will offer each patient a tailor-made treatment fitted to his or her genetic profile. Artificial lifeforms will help us understand the mechanisms that brought life into existence, as well as the secrets of aging and degenerative diseases. By thus extending our lifespan, we will be freer to explore the potential of human creativity, curiosity and self-realization. Being human --indeed, being alive-- may soon need redefinition.

The simplest sample of alien life would settle at once a host of burning questions. Even an independent lineage of organisms on Earth itself would support a vision of a universe where life is welcome to arise. For us, the most immediate cultural consequence of such a discovery would be a deepened sense of brotherhood with all lifeforms, including those made in our laboratories or emerged from our electronic minds.

The boundaries between us and not-us shall gradually shift. We could engineer ourselves to be smarter, healthier, or just prettier. If we manage to overcome the first wave of prejudices, the use of embryonic cells (some even with hybrid DNA) and robotic body parts could put an end to most inherited diseases and nearly all disabilities. When brain-machine interfaces and neural modelling reach the point where the whole content of a mind can be run in a digital medium, uploads will be the ultimate release from death.

Revolution, sans the blood

For some respondents, new times will demand new manners and conventions. The trend toward global decision-making is sure to defy the presuppositions we are used to living under. Institutions and laws, traditions and standards cast in the shape of times gone, will prove irrelevant for our coming preoccupations. This change will be most evident as it influences creative solutions to ethnic conflicts, economic inequality and other social concerns. If we learn to cooperatively address our real problems instead of engaging in endless arguments over who's to blame, who must pay, or who owns which piece of the cake, everything will change.

The proposals among the Edge Foundation respondents, though varied, speak of a common sentiment: humankind as a whole entity, with an essentially good nature that survives the cruelest enmities, and whose heterogeneous elements are not a potential for chaos to be feared, but a source of power to be embraced. The risk of wishful thinking remains, but the consequences of inaction are much worse; and only coordinated effort can succeed in addressing critical issues as nuclear proliferation, climate change, and financial instability.

Even without reaching such extremes, there are areas where a cooperative approach cannot but be beneficial. One interesting idea within this collection involves using wireless Internet to bring the best education resources in e-book format to every remote village under the guide of connected tutors. Simple schemes like this can have profound long-term effects.

The nature of change

Not everything needs to turn out so well. Catastrophe was another common theme in this series of essays. It may be a hurt nature taking its revenge, or a critical increase in our already unsustainable population, or an accidental nuclear detonation that sparks the next great war. The potential collapse of our industrial civilization is a real possibility we have to live with, and the authors who decided to treat this subject would prefer us not to forget it in the midst of our optimism.

Everything is changing. Or has already changed. Or won't. Or it doesn't matter. Change, as another group of authors pointed out, is in the eye of the beholder, and what "changing everything" means depends as much on our concept of "change" as on our concept of "everything." The next radical change to come may imply a redressing of the same old trends and values, or a complete reengineering of our way of life; and "everything" can mean the cultural climate of our time as well as the very fabric of existence. Change is natural, and is always occurring. And the selection made by the Edge Foundation for this year is an excellent and absorbing anthology of the best informed judgments on what is to come.

PÁGINA 12 [2.14.09]

Every year, the site Edge.org has asked a question of its members and friends, the best of the forefront of science today. The year it was the following: "What Will Change Everything: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" And, as every year, Radar ran a selection of those responses — enthusiastic, hopeful, murky, skeptical, encouraging, original from more than 150 physicists, neuroscientists, philosophers, biologists, chemists and mathematicians, among others. Go ahead: you know what awaits us.

By Carlos Silber 

Observe, quantify, predict, compare. Science develops and is maintained by these four pillars in balance with the deduction of the scientific method. It was Galileo 400 years ago who finally, after so much blind faith in Aristotle and validity of the argument of authority, one day left his house with these four keys to enter fully into the nature and understand it in its tracks.

If Darwin abused and wore the act of observing (and write in their journals hiperdetallistas), Einstein won his fame in 1919 when their predictions (encapsulated in the Theory of General Relativity) coincided with the facts: the comments made during a total eclipse Sun had shown that the light is diverted to pass near a massive body.

Prediction is often seen as the most valued scientific tool, able to quell that uncertainty and allow the moment to act with foresight. Many use it with restraint and other abuse it. ...

Scientists hate the hard but closely admire his vision extended. So when John Brockman, editor and head of the U.S. site of the agora Edge.org, on the forefront of science, found the question with which every year since 1998, takes the temperature to contemporary thought, biologists, physicists, chemists and all kinds of intellectuals of the "third culture" was flooded with mail box, a resounding "yes, and give you my answer."

"What Will Change Everything: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?", asked Brockman this time, who received 151 bright, optimistic, pessimistic, short, long, cryptic, theoretical as well as surprisingresponses — which in this custom-Radar, are condensed below:

[...continue]

[ED. NOTE: Feature article features the following contributors: Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Ian McEwan, George Dyson, Karl Sabbagh, Richard Dawkins, Zeilinger, Douglas Rushkoff, David Eagleman, Steve Nadis, Brian Eno, Craig Venter, Sherry Turkle, Marcel Kinsbourne] ...

[Spanish language original]

The 50 best blogs and sites; Web / VN Favorites
VRIJ NEDERLAND — Netherlands [2.13.09]

Edge

Fantastic online the biggest breeding ground where the spirits of the U.S. on anything discussed. Editor, society and intellectual impresario John Brockman beast Each year a question to a variety of scientists and thinkers—the Edge annual question '- and their answers are also published in book form, as warm rolls over the fly.

Read the full article →

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL [2.8.09]

Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was thewhole digerati-packed conference held last week.

Indeed, Brockman now calls the event the “Edge Dinner,” after his lively Edge Web site, where he presides over a variety of eclectic online debates and discussions (in January, for example, the topic was: “DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH?”).

Since I managed to miss the fete entirely (embarrassing confession: I fell dead asleep at 7 p.m. and did not wake until the next morning) and could not chronicle it, Brockman allowed me to post some photos from the event taken by him and by former Microsoft research guru and current intellectual property mogul Nathan Myhrvold.

Here are some, and you can see the rest here (click on the images to make them larger):

Google co-founder Larry Page and Applied Minds’ Danny Hillis

Former AOL kingpin and Revolution Health’s Steve Case and Jean Case, Case Foundation

Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Neoteny’s Joi Ito

Nathan Myhrvold, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University

Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos

Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates and DEKA’s Dean Kamen

New Media Nabobs Tim O’Reilly and Arianna Huffington

THE HUFFINGTON POST [2.5.09]

I've been taking part in the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference (aka TED) this week, being held for the first time in Long Beach, California after many years in Monterey.

I've been struck by how different the mood is here than it was last week in Davos. Much more upbeat. Maybe it's because TED is brimming with innovators, people less interested in figuring out how to prop up the collapsed economy of the last century than in creating an economy for the 21st century.

You also run into more quirky and interesting people per square inch than anywhere I've ever been. For instance, last night I found myself chatting with a stranger (this happens, of course, all the time at TED). When I asked him what he did, he told me that he owned The Kitchen in Boulder, Colorado, "America's greenest restaurant"... and is CEO of an Internet software company... and sits on the boards of Tesla Motors, SpaceX Corp., and ProgressNow.org. He turned out to be Kimbal Musk, the younger polymath brother of Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla Motors.

I also spent some time with perhaps the world's most maniacal polymath: Bill Gates. Gates played a big role at Davos, as he has here -- but here the conference and the crowd fit him to a T.

And he's been a real presence here, starting with delivering a much talked about keynote address, during which he drove home the importance of investing in malaria prevention by releasing a swarm of mosquitoes on the crowd, saying, "There is no reason only poor people should be infected." The stunt caused quite a bit of buzz (sorry!) around the blogosphere. "The mosquitoes had been irradiated," he reassured me. Okay, so all they could do was suck a little blood.

I asked him if he'd had any favorite speakers at TED. "I loved the lecture by Louise Fresco on food, agriculture, and sustainability," he told me. And Hans Rosling's talk on AIDS. The crowds' favorite -- and mine too, I think - was Elizabeth Gilbert."

Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, spoke on the nature of genius (and how we ruin it) and her personal tale of taking a year off to travel and reconnect with herself. She got a standing ovation, tapping into the mood at the conference - not to mention the zeitgeist - to unplug and recharge as we call it here at HuffPost.

So I asked Gates how he unplugs and recharges.

"I watch lectures on teach12.com," he told me. "I just listened to a series on Modern Economics byRobert Whaples, it was really great. They also have a great series on global warming."

Do you get enough sleep?, I asked, since sleep is my favorite obsession.

Gates smiled. "I try to get at least seven hours a night," he replied. "If I don't, my IQ gets lower."

As all conversations do these days, ours turned to the economy and his take on the stimulus debate.

After telling me that when it comes to the economy, he takes his lead from Warren Buffett, he added, "We have to be careful with how we deal with things, so we don't produce nonlinear consequences. I don't think, for example, the government should try to manage CEO behavior via the embarrassing headlines approach." He was also concerned that "free trade might be part of the collateral damage of the meltdown" and that once the government takes a more involved role in things it "might be hard to pull back."

Since education is one of the main domestic focuses of his Foundation, he expressed hope that the education portions of the stimulus package would survive in the final bill.

I asked him whether he thought the stimulus package is bold enough and big enough. "The problem," he told me, "is that anytime you talk about doing Big Things, there are thousands of ideas about what those Big Things should be. 'Let's cancel capitalism' is somebody's Big Idea. 'Let's introduce the flat tax' is somebody else's Big Idea. There are many people waiting for an opportunity to do a Big Thing -- and a crisis such as ours brings them all out."

Gates' biggest ideas these days are focused on the work being done by The Gates Foundation, which he has "maniacally" thrown himself into since removing himself from his full-time commitment to Microsoft this summer. He is devoting his considerable passion, intellect, and finances to global health initiatives (in particular the eradication of malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea diseases such as rotavirus; combined, these three cause over half the childhood deaths in the world), and to improving the U.S. educational system.

He recently released a lengthy letter in which he talks about his work at the foundation. It is a remarkable document (read it here) - both in its candor (he talks about what hasn't worked with his philanthropy as forthrightly as what has) and in the peek it offers at his conviction that if you apply all the IQ you can to a problem, you'll solve it.

It is especially intriguing to see how he applies the scientific and mathematical approach he used at Microsoft to problems such as feeding the world, attacking childhood diseases, and figuring out how to improve educational opportunities for all Americans.

The most important leit motif of our conversation was the need for all of us to step up and give whatever we can of our money and time. He's certainly setting an example for that. Even though his foundation's assets lost 20 percent of their value in 2008, Gates has decided to increase the amount they will spend this year -- going from $3.3 billion in 2008 to $3.8 billion in 2009.

"I believe that the wealthy have a responsibility to invest in addressing inequity even in these difficult times," he said. "Otherwise, we will come out of the economic downturn in a world that is even more unequal, with greater inequities in health and education, and fewer opportunities for people to improve their lives. There is no reason to accept that, when we know how to make huge gains over the long term."

According to Gates, it isn't a question of scale. It's a question of intent.

"I would encourage people to give or volunteer at whatever level they can," he told me. "I can't tell you how much joy it has given me to see the results at some of the schools we have worked with here at home or at some of the most faraway places devastated by malaria. It's hard not to be affected."

Indeed, Gates ends his foundation letter with a moving example about how making a difference doesn't have to mean developing a vaccine for malaria -- it can boil down to changing one person's life:

At Lee High School in Houston, we met a principal named Cesar Alvarez. Cesar told us about a student who had come to school as a freshman three years before and was in a gang. He was far behind in school, and he wouldn't even talk in class. Cesar got very involved with this student and worked with him every day. Today the student is a senior, on course to graduate, and planning to go to college. When Cesar came to this part of the story, he broke down and cried, because he had worked so hard and practically worn himself out for that student. Melinda and I see this kind of dedication around the world and in every issue the foundation works on. It inspires us to help people do great work, and we feel very lucky to be able to support them.


He has clearly been leading by example in changing both the business world and the world of philanthropy. But when it comes to sleep, all I can say is that when I left a dinner given by EDGE's John Brockman after midnight last night, Gates was still there talking away with X Prize's Peter Diamandis about providing big rewards for scientific breakthroughs

SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN [2.5.09]

Als Antwort auf diese Systemkrise der Wissenschaft haben sich in den angelsächsischen Ländern, teilweise auch in Skandinavien und Frankreich, neue Wege intellektueller Produktion entwickelt. Wissenschaftler in den USA werden zunehmend zu Autoren populärer Bücher, ihre Erkenntnisse werden auch daran gemessen, ob sie sich erzählen lassen. Und Publizisten wagen den Weg in die Wissenschaft. Neue Welt-Erkenntnis blüht in den Schnittstellen von Wissenschaft und Publizistik. Autoren wie Alain de Botton und Malcolm Gladwell schreiben hochkomplexe Bestseller über Themen wie Ästhetik, Intuition oder Erfolg ("Tipping Point", "Die Überflieger"). Und das legendäre Internetportal TED versammelt die Botschafter der "Dritten Kultur", jener Wissenschaft(en), die nach neuen Synthesen des Welt-Verstehens suchen.

Dieser "Dritten Kultur" (eine Wortschöpfung von John Brockman) fühle ich mich verpflichtet. Dem interdisziplinären Ansatz hat sich auch die Zeppelin-Universität in Friedrichshafen verschrieben, eine Hochschule "zwischen Kultur, Ökonomie, und Politik", in der ungewohnte Wege des Akademischen gegangen werden, an denen ich teilhaben darf. In den Aufnahme-Audits dieser Uni werden den Studenten typische "delphische Fragen" gestellt: 

- Gibt es heute einen ähnlich großen Irrtum gibt wie die Vorstellung der Welt als Scheibe?
- Wird es etwas nach dem Kapitalismus geben?
- Warum gibt es so wenig fröhliche Wissenschaftler?

Google Translation

BUSINESS DAY [2.5.09]

THE future is radically unpredictable. It’s unpredictable because we can only track change. We can’t predict futures. Humans can do a little better than other species in predicting futures, but because of the rate of change of technology in human society, constantly throwing out new problems because of the complexity of the social changes that are occurring, then predicting the future becomes extremely hard.

"That is why I say in many respects it’s radically unpredictable. What I do insist is that we have the freedom to make choices about it … but we don’t have infinite flexibility in making those choices …we are constrained by our evolutionary past, by our biological givens — none of us can walk on water, any more than we can grow wings." Steven Rose in The two Steves debate

"Towards the end of the 19th century, the famous physicist William Thomson, more commonly known as Lord Kelvin, proclaimed the end of physics. Despite the silliness of declaring a field moribund, particularly one that had been subject to so many important developments not so long before Thomson’s ill-fated pronouncement, you can’t really fault the poor devil for not foreseeing quantum mechanics and relativity and the revolutionary impact they would have. Seriously, how could anyone, even someone as smart as Lord Kelvin, have predicted quantum mechanics?" Lisa Randall, Physicist, Harvard University 

"I used to think you could … In Profiles of the Future, Arthur C Clarke made it seem so easy. "

And so did all those other experts who confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who for decades predicted ‘human equivalence in 10 years’, the nanotechnology prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing within 15 years, and so on.

"Mostly, the predictions of science and technology types were wonderful: space colonies, flying cars in everyone’s garage, the conquest (or even reversal) of ageing. (There were of course the doomsayers, too, such as the population-bomb theorists who said the world would run out of food by the turn of the century.)

"But at last, after watching all those forecasts not come true, and in fact become falsified in a crashing, breathtaking manner, I began to question the entire business of making predictions.

"And then I finally decided that I knew the source of this incredible mismatch between confident forecast and actual result. The universe is a complex system in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even today).

"There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what’s going to happen as they jointly work themselves out.

"Formerly, when I heard or read a prediction, I believed it. Nowadays I just roll my eyes, shake my head, and turn the page." Ed Regis, Science Writer, from an article at www.edge.org

LA STAMPA [1.30.09]

PIERO BIANUCCI Gli scienziati credono o sanno? Forse per poter sapere prima devono credere. La fede, sia pure non quella religiosa, sarebbe il vero motore della scienza. E' la tesi paradossale di Non e' vero ma ci credo (titolo rubato a una commedia di Peppino de Filippo), libro che raccoglie le opinioni di un centinaio tra i piu' brillanti fisici, astronomi, matematici, biologi e psicologi, ma anche scrittori, artisti, divulgatori e registi, che si riuniscono nel salotto virtuale dell'agente editoriale John Brockman: il sito www.edge.org Edge significa bordo. Siamo sulla frastaglia frontiera della ricerca che separa il noto dall'ignoto, dove e' lecito fare ipotesi folli e affermazioni scientificamente scandalose. Per attirare il suo club di cervelli su un terreno cosi' scivoloso Brockman ha lanciato su Edge questa provocazione: «A volte le grandi menti riescono a intuire la verita' prima di averne le prove. In che cosa credi anche se non puoi provarlo?». Una credenza diffusa ma non provata e' l'esistenza di altre forme di vita nell'universo. Con varie sfumature. Martin Rees, cosmologo al Trinity College di Cambridge, pensa che, anche se la nostra civilta' fosse l'unica, si espandera' fino a colonizzare il cosmo e a renderlo «intelligente». Al punto che i nostri lontani discendenti sapranno persino «dare origine a nuovi universi» ubbidienti a leggi fisiche da essi prestabilite, cioe' universi geneticamente modificati. Paul Davies invece crede che la vita sia gia' onnipresente, in pieno accordo con Craig Venter, il genetista-imprenditore che ha mappato il genoma umano. Il biologo Richard Dawkins e' convinto che la selezione darwiniana agisca anche sulle specie aliene: tesi non innocua, perche' presuppone che l'Evoluzione preceda il Progetto, e non viceversa. Sarebbe interessante un commento di papa Ratzinger. Piu' modestamente, il fisico Kenneth Ford pensa che «ovunque nella nostra galassia esista una vita microbica» (il paradiso per le multinazionali degli antibiotici). Ci sono i lapalissiani: «Credo che niente sia vero finche' non viene dimostrato» (Maria Spiropulu, fisico sperimentale al Cern di Ginevra). I settari: Philip Anderson, Nobel della fisica, crede che la teoria delle stringhe sia vuota e sottragga intelligenze creative a ricerche piu' importanti. I sofisti: «Credo nel credere» (Tor Norretranders, scrittore). I romantici: «Credo nel vero amore», David Buss, psicologo, Universita' del Texas. Gli esteti: Leon Lederman, Nobel della fisica, crede nella bellezza intesa come simmetria, e se la simmetria e' violata, apre la strada a una bellezza di ordine superiore. Gli ovvi: l'ambientalista Schneider (Stanford University) crede nel riscaldamento globale. I minimalisti: Freeman Dyson, illustre fisico teorico, e' convinto, ma non sa dimostrarlo, che mai il contrario di una potenza di 2 sia una potenza di 5. Esistono anche i sognatori. La biologa Stuart Kaufman spera che esista una «quarta legge della termodinamica» che fa esistere nell'universo tante biosfere come la nostra, l'informatico Ray Kurzweil e' sicuro che nel trasmettere informazioni supereremo la velocita' della luce, molti non si rassegnano all'idea che non esista qualche forma di esistenza al di la' della morte. I neuroscienziati, com'e' giusto, sono ossessionati dal rapporto tra il cervello fisico e la mente immateriale che ne emerge. Ma poi arriva Alun Anderson, gia' direttore di «New Scientist» e smitizza: «Io credo che gli scarafaggi abbiano una coscienza». Insomma, ancora un passo oltre il «bordo», e ci troviamo al Bar Sport. Ma il libro messo insieme da Brockman, benche' corra il rischio del gossip, ha il merito grande di far riflettere sulla dialettica tra intuizione, teoria ed esperimento in modo estremamente concreto. Ci ricorda che la scienza e' fatta di domande piu' che di risposte, di fantasia piu' che di arida razionalita'. L'autore John Brockman (foto sopra) ha creato www.edge.org, un sito in cui confrontano le loro ipotesi di ricerca scienziati e intellettuali. Di qui il libro (a sin. l'illustrazione di Doriano Solinas, in copertina).

EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA [1.28.09]

Two Victorian gentleman, back in 1875, engaged in an entertaining polemic about the superiority of science or the humanities. TH Huxley disregard the study of the classics asMatthew Arnold was mofaba of evolutionary theory, both with similar intellectual occlusion. The rifirrafe was repeated in the late fifties when CP Snow, a physicist and novelist, denounced the chasm separating the "two cultures", the scientific and literary, and ran a way of understanding something of an unequal alliance of civilizations among scientists that are moving steadily towards the future and some intellectuals that carry the weight of the past. That alliance was hot air and Snow is to step out of an angry guardian letters FR Leavis who encouraged the cotarro.

Now things are clearer and Leavis draws the wrath of nostalgic sympathy for the old junk. The narrow plume of people with scientific knowledge has been hard to crack, so that even in the nineties, John Brockman returned to the burden by advocating a "third culture", resulting from the reconciliation of science and letters. But this third culture, such as the Edge of Brockman have slipped on the thick skin of the writers alone, and has been echoed in the scientific community, increasingly concerned by spreading its activities.

All this brings me to remember the neuroscientist R. Douglas Hofstadter, who became famous in 1980 when he won with a fascinating book, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Pulitzer and the American Book Award. Hofstadter proposed that arises from our individual self-functioning of the mind. Although this sounds thick, the scientist who plays the piano and has translated the novel in verse Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, it has a stunning clarity that leads to deception of the reader feel smarter. Intellectual joy that can be tested in his latest book, I am a strange loop. Nostalgia with the return of the third culture in which a scientist pampers his writings as would a poet (Hofstadter does) and a passionate writer metabolize fabulous trompicones of science.

¿TERCERA CULTURA? [Spanish original]

I CERVELLI DI EDGE EL A "FEDE"
LA REPUBBLICA [1.28.09]

Non posso non tornare — a distanza di pochissirno tempo - su John Brockman e sul suo progetto Edge, perche II Saggiatore pubbliea Non evera rna ci credo, dove la domanda"in che cosa credi ancbe se non puoi provado?" si rivela un assist irresistibile per un ceutinaio di scienziati, filosofi, biologi, antropo10gi, psicologi cognitivi, ecosivla, per slanciarsi mente&cuore a trattare di intelligenza aliena, coscienza degli anirnali, risorse aneom inesplorate della nostra mente, modelli eognitivi dei bambini, inutilita delle scienze sociali e storiche, e anehe del vero amore. Un Iibro cosi - lussureggiante, brillante, energetico rivela una volta di pili quanta abbondanza c'il nei mondi evolutivi (e implicitamente quanto spenta il la cullura accademica tradizionale).

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FOCUS ONLINE [1.27.09]

Martin VogtNassim Taleb, Autor des Bestsellers „Der schwarze Schwan"
Schuld an der Finanzkrise ist die Natur des Menschen, sagen zwei renommierte Wissenschaftler: Nobelpreisträger Daniel Kahneman und Bestsellerautor Nassim Taleb („Der Schwarze Schwan“).
Zwei Männer sitzen auf der Bühne. Links Daniel Kahneman, 74, hellwache Augen, Nobelpreisträger. Rechts Nassim Taleb, 49, Ex-Wall-Street-Banker, Bestsellerautor. Beide reden auf dem Zukunftskongress Digital Life Design (DLD) in München über die Finanzkrise, über den Beginn – vor allem reden sie über Menschen. Sie sagen, es liegt an uns, an unserem Wesen, dass die Krise ausgebrochen ist. Und sie wählen harte Worte, als sie das Ausmaß der Katastrophe bemessen.

Kahneman erklärt, warum sich Blasen bilden an den Finanzmärkten, obwohl doch jeder weiß, dass sie irgendwann platzen. Der Wissenschaftler bemüht einen Vergleich mit dem Wetter: Wenn es drei Jahre wenig regne, dächten die Menschen, das sei fortan normal. Wer über Jahre sehe, dass die Preise für Aktien nur steigen, der könne sich nicht vorstellen, dass der Trend bricht.

„Die Verantwortlichen müssen gehen – heute und nicht morgen“

Taleb geht scharf ins Gericht mit Bankern. Der Steuerzahler alimentiere Manager in dieser Zeit, da Staaten Milliarden ausgeben, um den Zusammenbruch zu verhindern. „Ich möchte, dass die Verantwortlichen für die Krise heute gehen, heute und nicht morgen“, sagt er und beugt sich energisch nach vorn. Der Autor geißelt die Risikomodelle der Banken, er spricht von „Scharlatanerie“.

Es sei Unfug, zu glauben, man könne Risiken abschätzen und sich damit vor einem Crash schützen. Taleb ist berühmt geworden mit seiner These des schwarzen Schwans, die er in seinem gleichnamigen Bestseller beschrieben hat. Schwarze Schwäne, das sind Ereignisse, die sich nicht vorhersehen lassen – auch nicht mit dem besten Modell. „Menschen werden nie in der Lage sein, Zufall zu kontrollieren“, sagt er.

Der frühe Warner

Taleb hat schon früh gewarnt vor der Krise, im Jahr 2003 nannte er „Dynamit“, was in den Bilanzen des US-Hypothekenfinanzierers Fannie Mae schlummerte. Im Herbst vergangenen Jahres übernahm die US-Regierung das Institut in einem dramatischen Rettungsakt. Der „Sunday Times“ sagte Taleb 2008: „Banker sind gefährlich.“ Und auch jetzt sieht er einen Skandal: Was hätten die Banken gemacht mit dem Geld, das der Staat lockermache, fragt er provokant die Zuhörer. „Sie haben weiter Boni gezahlt, und sie haben die Risiken erhöht.“ Es sei ja nicht eigenes Geld.

Taleb fordert rigoros: Banken verstaatlichen – und Finanzmodelle abschaffen. Kahneman folgt ihm nicht ganz. Klar, die Modelle seien nicht geeignet, einen Zusammenbruch vorherzusagen. Aber man dürfe nicht die Natur des Menschen außer Acht lassen. Der Mensch werde immer nach Modellen verlangen – auch wenn sie falsch seien.

La scienza «procede per funerali», infatti rivede continuamente le proprieposizioni Per questo é cosi affidabile
IL SOLE 24 ORE [1.17.09]

Sistemi di pensiero

«In cosa credi che non puoi dimostrare?»: da questa domanda del sito «Edge» é nato un libro che raccoglie le risposte di scienziati e intellettuali, da Weinberg a Wilson. Ne discute lo scrittore inglese Ian McEwan, partendo da Otello e lago

Sarà in libreria da giovedi il libro a cura di John Brockman, Non è vero ma ci credo. Intuizioni non provate, future verità (Il Saggiatore, Milano, pagg. 266 € is 00). II libro riprende le risposte giunte al sito www.edge.org alla domanda «In cosa credi anche se non puoi provarlo?». Le risposte sono firmate da un centinaio tra i più autorevoli filosofi, scrittori, psicologi e intellettuali contemporanei. L'intervento di IanMcEwan che pubblichiamo a fianco è scritto appositamente e non è compreso nel volume.

_________

di Ian McEwan

...Il lettore troverà qui un'espressione collettiva di meraviglia nei confronti del mondo vivente e inanimato che non ha equivalenti nel campo, per esempio, delle discipline culturali. In arte, forse un felice parallelo potrebbe essere rappresentato dalla poesia lirica. Un'altra caratteristica interessante è la prevalenza, qui, di ciò che E. O. Wilson chiama «l'armonia meravigliosa». I confini tra diverse specializzazioni hanno cominciato a sfaldarsi quando gli scienziati hanno scoperto di aver bisogno di basarsi su giudizi o procedure relativi a campi di studio simili o utili al loro. L'antico sogno dell'Illuminismo, un corpo di conoscenze unico, diventa un po' più vicino quando biologi ed economi si ispirano gli uni alle idee degli altri; i neuroscienziati hanno bisogno dei matematici, i biologi molecolari sconfinano nei territori poco presidiati dei chimici e dei fisici. Anche i cosmologi si sono ispirati alla teoria evolutiva. E tutti, naturalmente, hanno bisogno di computer molto sofisticati. Per parlarsi attraverso le rispettive discipline, gli scienziati sono stati costretti ad abbandonare i loro vocabolari specifici e ad adottare una lingua franca, l'inglese standard. Il casuale beneficiario, naturalmente, è il lettore comune, che non ha bisogno di familiarizzare con strani gerghi per seguire le discussioni. Una conseguenza - e forse un simbolo - di questa sintesi emergente nella comunità scientifica sono il sito web di Edge e la sua peculiare ed elettrizzante cultura intellettuale. Queste pagine rappresentano solo una piccola parte di un colloquio affascinante, ancora in corso, e aperto a tutti. La scienza «procede per funerali», infatti rivede continuamente le proprieposizioni Per questo é cosi affidabile.

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