But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

THE PANCAKE PEOPLE, OR, "THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD" 
Richard Foreman

vs.

THE GÖDEL-TO-GOOGLE NET [3.8.05]
George Dyson

As Richard Foreman so beautifully describes it, we've been pounded into instantly-available pancakes, becoming the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses in the whole Gödel-to-Google net. Does the resulting mind (as Richardson would have it) belong to us? Or does it belong to something else?

THE REALITY CLUB: Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, Steven Johnson, Marvin Minsky , Douglas Rushkoff, Roger Schank, James O'Donnell, Rebecca Goldstein. respond to Richard Foreman and George Dyson

Introduction

In early 2001, avant-garde playwright and director Richard Foreman, called to enquire about Edge's activities. He had noticed the optimism of the Edgecrowd and the range of intellectual interests and endeavors and felt that he needed to to begin a process to explore these areas. Then 9/11 happened. We never had our planned meeting.

Several years have gone by and recently Foreman opened his most recent play for his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Marks Church in the Bowery in New York City. He also announced that the play—The Gods Are Pounding My Head—would be his last.

Foreman presents Edge with a statement and a question. The statement appears in his program and frames the sadness of The Gods Are Pounding My Head. The question is an opening to the future. With both, Foreman belatedly hopes to engage Edge contributors in a discussion, and in this regard George Dyson has written the initial response, entitled "The Gödel-to-Google Net".

Introduction

November 20, 2004 — In 1974, in honor of my friend Gregory Bateson's 70th birthday, I asked him if he would give his blessing to a book I was planning about his work. He agreed, and the result was About Bateson, a volume of original essays about his work and ideas by interesting thinkers in various fields bracketed by my Introduction and his Afterword, both of which follow below.

Gregory Bateson was one of the most important and least understood thinkers of the twentieth century. Bateson originated the double bind theory of schizophrenia, was the first to apply cybernetic theory to the social sciences, and made important biological discoveries about such nonhuman species as the dolphin. His book, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, published in 1972, attracted widespread attention. We met in April, 1973 at the AUM Conference ("American University of Masters") at Esalen in Big Sur,  where we immediately became friends, and where he convinced me to become an agent. Within a month I had founded Brockman, Inc. and sold his book The Evolutionary Idea (ultimately published under the title Mind In Nature).

While Gregory was very much alive, with his blessing and mentoring, I conceived of, and edited, a book entitled About Bateson, a book which featured seven substantial essays by eminent thinkers in their own right-containing their own interpretations of and reactions to Bateson's work. 

In the 250-page volume, Mary Catherine Bateson discussed her father's treatment of the concept of wisdom and love-the "lucid" computations of the heart"; Ray Birswhistell analyzed Bateson's unique methodology; David Lipset provided a short biography of the thinker's wary years; Rollo May discussed Bateson's humanism; Margaret Mead explored his effect on cross-cultural analysis (Groegory her 2nd husband); Edwin Schlossberg contributed a piece on consciousness, social change, and cybernetics. As editor, I wrote the introductory essay. The book concluded with Gregory Bateson's own original 12-page Afterword, in which he presented his latest thinking on his life's work. Also included was a 2-page CV and a Bibliography page of his book.

At that time, Bateson contended that as a result of advances in cybernetics and fundamental mathematics, many other areas of thought have shifted. In The Evolutionary Idea, a proposed new book, he planned to gather together those new advances to present an alternative to then current orthodox theories of evolution. This alternative view was to stress the role of information, that is, of mind, in all levels of biology from genetics to ecology and from human culture to the pathology of schizophrenia. In place of natural selection of organisms, Bateson considered the survival of patterns, ideas, and forms of interaction,

"Any descriptive proposition," he said, "which remains true longer will out-survive other propositions which do not survive so long. This switch from the survival of the creatures to the survival of ideas which are immanent in the creatures (in their anatomical forms and in their interrelationships) gives a totally new slant to evolutionary ethics and philosophy. Adaptation, purpose, homology, somatic change, and mutation all take on new meaning with this shift in theory."

Bateson had an endless repertoire of concepts and ideas to talk about. A typical conversation might be about metaphor versus sacrament, schismogenesis, metaphysics, explanatory principles, heuristic versus fundamental ideas, the value of deduction, steady state society, metapropositions, deuterolearning, cybernetic explanation, idea as difference, logical categories of learning, mental determinism, end linkage, and on and on.

While his ideas did take hold in some fields (schizophrenia, family therapy, among others), the natural audience for his work, the evolutionary biologists, had little interest in him. The mainstream thinkers in that field believed his ideas were muddled. This is one of several reasons why he ultimately abandoned the The Evolutionary Idea, which was to have been the first major restatement of evolutionary theory in half a century. Based on his previous experience, he was worried about the difficulty of getting across his ideas. The implications of the theory are based on acceptance of a radical new order of things, a worldview totally alien to our traditional Western way of thinking.

Aspects of this worldview derived from his association in the 1940s with Warren McCulloch, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener et al, who were all present at the creation of cybernetic theory. It was the radical epistemology behind these ideas seemed to inform a lot of this thinking. "The cybernetic idea is the most important idea since Jesus Christ.," he once told me.

And this is where we connected, as my book, By The Late John Brockman, which was very much on the radar screen at that time, was nothing if not a radical epistemological statement on language, thought, and reality. I had written the trilogy that ultimately comprised the book with no reference to Bateson as I had not read him and had barely heard of him until I was invited to the AUM conference in 1973 (my late invitation was sent when the organizers, John Lilly and Alan Watts, both strong supporters of my book, found out their keynote speaker, Richard Feynman, was ill, and they needed a replacement. Only when I arrived at the conference did I find out what I was walking into.)

"Evolutionists are an anxious, conservative, and spiteful bunch," Bateson said. "In fact, they kill each other." Bateson was referring to the famous affair involving his father, William Bateson, the preeminent British scientist of his day who, picking up on the work of Mendel, coined the word "genetics" and began the field, and William Kammerer, the Austrian biologist. Kammerer, a Lamarckian, committed suicide over research involving the inherited characteristics of the midwife toad. "I don't think they will like this book very much," Bateson said, realizing that he will be straying far from the traditional debate of natural selection versus inherited characteristics. "I shall not write the book. I am too old and too sick to fight the fight".

But he was always willing to travel, to interact with all kinds of people in order to present his ideas. This would lead him into strange surroundings, where the participants had no idea of what to expect and were not prepared for his depth and erudition. "Why do you bother?" I ask in reference to this particularly moribund gathering. It is clear that few here have any inkling of what he is saying. "One simply keeps going," he says gently, "and leaves the name behind." It wasn't easy making a living as an epistemologist, he noted.

Yet, he did receive recognition. Charles Roycroft, British psychoanalyst, was quoted in the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue of the Times Literary Supplement as saying that Gregory Bateson was the most underrated writer of the past seventy-five years.

Bateson is not easy. The only way to "get" Bateson is to read him. To spend time with him, in person or through his essays, was a rigorous intelligent exercise, an immense relief from the trivial forms that command respect in contemporary society

—JB

Novelists may win the plaudits, but they don't have all the good stories...
 

Richard Dawkins gives advice to entrants to a competition for young science writers.

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the former Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The Magic of Reality.

Richard Dawkins's Edge Bio Page 

THE REALITY CLUB: Dennis Overbye, Philip W. Anderson, Anton Zeilinger, Maria Spiropulu, Marc D. Hauser, Keith Devlin

Language can help to shape the way we think about the world. Richard Dawkins welcomes an attempt to raise consciousness about atheism by co-opting a word with cheerful associations

I once read a science-fiction story in which astronauts voyaging to a distant star were waxing homesick: "Just to think that it's springtime back on Earth!" You may not immediately see what's wrong with that, so ingrained is our unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism. "Unconscious" is exactly right. That is where consciousness-raising comes in.

I suspect it is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the south pole on top. Now, wouldn't that be an excellent thing to pin to our classroom walls? What a splendid consciousness-raiser. Day after day, the children would be reminded that north has no monopoly on up. The map would intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness. They'd go home and tell their parents.

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising. I used to laugh at "him or her", and at "chairperson", and I still try to avoid them on aesthetic grounds. But I recognise the power and importance of consciousness-raising. I now flinch at "one man one vote". My consciousness has been raised. Probably yours has too, and it matters.

I used to deplore what I regarded as the tokenism of my American atheist friends. They were obsessed with removing "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance (it was inserted as late as 1954), whereas I cared more about the chauvinistic nastiness of pledging allegiance to a flag in the first place. They would cross out "In God we Trust" on every dollar bill that passed through their hands (again, it was inserted only in 1956), whereas I worried more about the tax-free dollars amassed by bouffant-haired televangelists, fleecing gullible old ladies of their life savings. My friends would risk neighbourhood ostracism to protest at the unconstitutionality of Ten Commandments posters on classroom walls. "But it's only words," I would expostulate. "Why get so worked up about mere words, when there's so much else to object to?" Now I'm having second thoughts. Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.

My favourite consciousness-raising effort is one I have mentioned many times before (and I make no apology, for consciousness-raising is all about repetition). A phrase like "Catholic child" or "Muslim child" should clang furious bells of protest in the mind, just as we flinch when we hear "one man one vote". Children are too young to know their religious opinions. Just as you can't vote until you are 18, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society's impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit your parents'. We'd be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn't it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant?

Catholic child? Flinch. Protestant child? Squirm. Muslim child? Shudder. Everybody's consciousness should be raised to this level. Occasionally a euphemism is needed, and I suggest "Child of Jewish (etc) parents". When you come down to it, that's all we are really talking about anyway. Just as the upside-down (northern hemisphere chauvinism again: flinch!) map from New Zealand raises consciousness about a geographical truth, children should hear themselves described not as "Christian children" but as "children of Christian parents". This in itself would raise their consciousness, empower them to make up their own minds and choose which religion, if any, they favour, rather than just assume that religion means "same beliefs as parents". I could well imagine that this linguistically coded freedom to choose might lead children to choose no religion at all.

Please go out and work at raising people's consciousness over the words they use to describe children. At a dinner party, say, if ever you hear a person speak of a school for Islamic children, or Catholic children (you can read such phrases daily in newspapers), pounce: "How dare you? You would never speak of a Tory child or a New Labour child, so how could you describe a child as Catholic (Islamic, Protestant etc)?" With luck, everybody at the dinner party, next time they hear one of those offensive phrases, will flinch, or at least notice and the meme will spread.

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word "gay". I used to mourn the loss of gay in (what I still think of as) its true sense. But on the bright side (wait for it) gay has inspired a new imitator, which is the climax of this article. Gay is succinct, uplifting, positive: an "up" word, where homosexual is a down word, and queer, faggot and pooftah are insults. Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal, we need a word of our own, a word like "gay". You can say "I am an atheist" but at best it sounds stuffy (like "I am a homosexual") and at worst it inflames prejudice (like "I am a homosexual").

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new "gay". Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn't it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can't imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright. The website http://www.celebatheists.com/ suggests numerous intellectuals and other famous people are brights. Brights constitute 60% of American scientists, and a stunning 93% of those scientists good enough to be elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences (equivalent to Fellows of the Royal Society) are brights. Look on the bright side: though at present they can't admit it and get elected, the US Congress must be full of closet brights. As with gays, the more brights come out, the easier it will be for yet more brights to do so. People reluctant to use the word atheist might be happy to come out as a bright.

Geisert and Futrell are very insistent that their word is a noun and must not be an adjective. "I am bright" sounds arrogant. "I am a bright" sounds too unfamiliar to be arrogant: it is puzzling, enigmatic, tantalising. It invites the question, "What on earth is a bright?" And then you're away: "A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic world view."

"You mean a bright is an atheist?"

"Well, some brights are happy to call themselves atheists. Some brights call themselves agnostics. Some call themselves humanists, some freethinkers. But all brights have a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism."

"Oh, I get it. It's a bit like 'gay'. So, what's the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?"

"What would you suggest?"

Of course, even though we brights will scrupulously insist that our word is a noun, if it catches on it is likely to follow gay and eventually re-emerge as a new adjective. And when that happens, who knows, we may finally get a bright president.