We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with.

YOCHAI BENKLER is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. He is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Yochai Benkler's Edge Bio Page

Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don't know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck. About human psychology, nothing could be explained in evolutionary terms: we just somehow developed a big brain with its spandrels and all, and that's it.

Introduction

By Steven Pinker

Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.

And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Dutton has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a universal definition of art—something that many theorists assumed was simply impossible. And he has advanced a theory that aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution. His ideas in this area are not meant to be the last word, but they lay out testable hypotheses, and point to many fields that can be brought to bear on our understanding of art.

I see this as part of a larger movement of consilience, in which (to take a few examples), ideas from auditory cognition will provide insight into music, phonology will help illuminate poetics, semantics and pragmatics will advance our understanding of fiction, and moral psychology will be brought to bear on jurisprudence and philosophy. And in his various roles, Denis Dutton will be there when it happens.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, The Stuff of Thought.

DENIS DUTTON, a philosopher, is founder and editor of the highly regarded Web publication, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). He teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, writes widely on aesthetics. and is editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, and the author of the recently published The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.

Denis Dutton's Edge Bio Page

Making these sorts of wholly intangible "symbolic" concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot.

HOW WORDS COULD END A WAR [1.27.09]
By Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges

SCOTT ATRAN, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is the author of In Gods We Trust. JEREMY GINGES is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page

Jeremy Ginges's Edge Bio Page

The most exciting thing that can happen is when theoretical dreams that started as fantasies, as desires, become projects that people work hard to build. There is nothing like it; it is the ultimate tribute. At one moment you have just a glimmer of a thought and at another moment squiggles on paper. Then one day you walk into a laboratory and there are all these pipes, and liquid helium is flowing, and currents are coming in and out with complicated wiring, and somehow all this activity is supposedly corresponds to those little thoughts that you had. When this happens, it's magic.

FRANK WILCZEK, a theoretical physicist at MIT and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2004), is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). He is the author of Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.

Frank Wilczek's Edge Bio Page

Mathematicians and others are endeavoring to apply insights gleaned from the sciences of complexity to the seemingly intractable problem of understanding the world economy. I have a guess, however, that if this problem can be solved (and that is unlikely in the near future), then it will not be possible to use this knowledge to make money on financial markets. One can make money only if there is real risk based on actual uncertainty, and without uncertainty there is no risk.

[EDITOR'S NOTE:] Heinz R. Pagels, died on July 23, 1988, in a mountain climbing accident on Pyramid Peak in Aspen, Colorado. A physicist, he was Executive Director of The New York Academy of Sciences, adjunct professor of physics at Rockefeller University, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He was the author of three books:The Cosmic Code, Perfect Symmetry, and Dreams of Reason. He was also a founding member, and, at the time of his death, president of "The Reality Club," which, in 1997, moved to the Web as Edge.

It was before and after Reality Club meetings at the New York Academy of Sciences around 1985-6 that Heinz began to talk about the themes that became central to his 1988 book Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, (Simon & Schuster):

"the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear dynamics and selective systems, the new understanding of chaos, experimental mathematics, the connectionist's ideas, neural networks, and parallel distributive processing". ...

He notes that "the computer, with its ability to manage enormous amounts of data and to simulate reality, provides a new window on that view of nature." In other words new technology equals new perception. He also had interesting insights into how the new sciences of complexity would impact global financial markets. He wrote:

As a new mode of production, the computer creates not only a new class of people struggling for intellectual and social acceptance, but a new way of thinking about knowledge. It will transform the scientific enterprise and bring forth a new worldview.

Given the current global economic meltdown, it's instructive to re-read Pagels. Below, please find the Preface and Chapter 7: "The Quick Buck Becomes Quicker". The Edge Introduction is by Emanuel Derman, a physicist who was at Rockefeller University with Pagels, and went on to become the world's best know "Quant".

— John Brockman

INTRODUCTION

By Emanuel Derman

There are dualisms everywhere: mind or matter, literature or pornography, investment or speculation. Just today in the New York Times, David Brooks wondered whether our current economic crisis was due to greed or stupidity, and felt obliged to plump for stupidity.

All of these 'or's are choices between complex mental constructs that merely sound simple or primitive; every 'or' is an attempt to forcibly convert the duality into a unity. But the fact that that we can see (at least) two sides to each of these issues signifies intrinsic complexity. Physicists long ago learned to turnwave or particle into wave and particle and live with it, or at least stop thinking about it for as long as they could keep successfully calculating.

Heinz Pagels' 1998 book The Dreams of Reason tackled the science of complexity and the use of computers to understand complex systems that defy reduction. I met Heinz when I was a colleague in particle physics, the most reductionist of fields, in an office down the hall at The Rockefeller University in the late 1970s. An enthusiastic iconoclast with wide interests, Heinz devoted one chapter to the consequences he foresaw of putting science and computing in the service of banking, finance and trading. He presciently warned about the possibility of uncontrollably complex markets, and of the way in which finance, intended to finance investment and construction, may be tempted to incestuously turn in upon itself to recursively finance merely more financial activities.

— Emanuel Derman

EMANUEL DERMAN is a professor in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. He is the author of My Life As a Quant. He was recently featured in "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street" [3.9.09], a front page New York Times "Science Times" profile by Dennis Overbye.

THE REALITY CLUB: Joseph Traub, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin

DREAMS OF REASON: THE RISE OF THE SCIENCES OF COMPLEXITY
Simon & Schuster, 1988
BY HEINZ R.PAGELS

PREFACE

Chapter 7: THE QUICK BUCK BECOMES QUICKER