I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.

Introduction
By John Brockman

On March 22, 2000 the Templeton Foundation announced that physicist Freeman Dyson had won the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The Templeton Prize, awarded annually "to a living individual for outstanding originality in advancing the world's understanding of God or spirituality, is one of the world's largest monetary awards, this year valued at 600,000 pounds sterling, about $948,000. Created in 1972 by the pioneering global investor Sir John Templeton to remedy what he saw as an oversight by the Nobel Prizes, which do not honor the discipline of religion, the Templeton Prize is always set at an amount that exceeds the value of the Nobels. Previous Templeton Prize recipients include the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Colson, Ian Barbour, Paul Davies, physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, and Mother Teresa.

The following is the text of Freeman Dyson's acceptance speech on May 16, in the Washington National Cathedral.

-JB

FREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing The Universe, Infinite In All Directions Origins Of Life, From Eros To Gaia, Imagined Worlds, and The Sun, The Genome, And The Internet

Click here for Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio page

Roger Schank is a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist who has worked in the AI field for twenty-five years. Like Marvin Minsky, he takes the strong AI view, but rather than trying to build an intelligent machine he wants to deconstruct the human mind. He wants to know, in particular, how natural language — one's mother tongue — is processed, how memory works, and how learning occurs. Schank thinks of the human mind as a learning device, and he thinks that it is being taught in the wrong way. He is something of a gadfly; he deplores the curriculum-based, drill-oriented methods in today's schools, and his most recent contributions have been in the area of education, looking at ways to use computers to enhance the learning process.

Richard Dawkins	Steven Pinker

IS SCIENCE KILLING THE SOUL?
Richard Dawkins & Steven Pinker
Chaired by Tim Radford

Introduction

By John Brockman

On February 10, 1999, The Guardian-Dillons Debate at the Westminster Central Hall in London featured Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker in an event chaired by Tim Radford, Science Editor of The Guardian. Sold out weeks in advance, the evening attracted 2,300 attendees, with hundreds waiting outside. It was one of the toughest tickets in London in years.

The evening echoes an event held in Munich last November, "The Digital Planet", for which a thousand people turned out in a driving rainstorm to see and hear Dawkins and Pinker as well as Daniel C. Dennett and Jared Diamond introduced by Douglas Adams. More than a hundred journalists were in the audience. The lobby of the hotel looked more like the press center for a presidential election campaign.

Clearly, something is happening with this group of intellectuals.

While The Guardian-Dillons series is characterized as a "debate", Dawkins and Pinker, who are in general agreement across broad areas, presented what I would characterize as a high level seminar. As Dawkins pointed out: "The adversarial approach to truth isn't necessarily always the best one. On the contrary, when two people disagree strongly, a great deal of time may be wasted. It's been well said that when two opposite points of view are advocated with equal vigor, the truth does not necessarily lie mid-way between them. And in the same way, when two people agree about something, it's just possible that the reason they agree is that they're both right. There's also I suppose the hope that in a dialogue of this sort each speaker may manage to achieve a joint understanding with the other one, better than he would have done on his own."

— JB

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene (1976), 2d ed. 1989), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995) (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), and Unweaving the Rainbow (1998).

(Click here for Dawkins on Edge)

STEVEN PINKER is professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), Learnability and Cognition (1989), The Language Instinct (1994), and How the Mind Works (1997).

(Click here for Pinker on Edge)

TIM RADFORD is Science Editor of The Guardian

Edge thanks The Guardian and Dillons for permission to run the Guardian-Dillons Debate at the Westminster Central Hall on February 10, 1999

I recently received an email message from Steven Pinker urging me to interview a young Berkeley linguistics professor named John McWhorter for EDGE. Pinker was very impressed by McWhorter's new book, The Word on the Street , about to be published by Plenum, particularly by its "fresh and scientifically sophisticated positions on hot topics such as Ebonics, bilingual education, and how English literature (particularly Shakespeare) should be taught." He described McWhorter as a "rising star with a razor-sharp mind and a lot of guts." Attached was his blurb for the book:

"The Word on the Street is one of the best books ever written on language and pub- lic affairs. John McWhorter shows us how English is, was, and will be spoken, and spells out the implications for how it ought to be used and taught. His arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, thoroughly original, and — befitting a book on language — are lucidly and elegantly written. The Word on the Street is important, eye-opening, and a pleasure to read."

I then contacted John McWhorter who had other things on his mind. He proposed that instead of talking to him about the ideas in his book, that I publish a rather lengthy essay he had recently written on the subject of affirmative action at Berkeley. Herewith, the essay, "The Demise of Affirmative Action at UC Berkeley: Dissecting the Stalemate." It is passionate, courageous, bound to stir controversy, and, hopefully, to "advance the dialogue."

JOHN H. MCWHORTER is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Born in Philadelphia, he earned a master's degree in American Studies at NYU and received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993. He taught at Cornell University before entering his current position at Berkeley. He specializes in pidgin and creole languages, particularly of the Caribbean, and is the author of Toward a New Model of Creole Genesis. One of the few accessible linguists, he has been interviewed widely by the media, including The Today Show, Dateline NBC, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and Newsweek. He also teaches black musical theater history at Berkeley and is currently writing a musical biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.