Edge in the News: 2005

Each year, John Brockman at Edge.org asks some of the brightest minds in science and technology to consider one question. This year: What is your dangerous idea?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Respondents include many whose work has appeared on Boing Boing before, including: J. Craig Venter, Sherry Turkle, Danny Hillis, Jaron Lanier, Rodney Brooks, David Gelernter, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Rudy Rucker, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, and Clifford Pickover.

Here is U.C. Davis neurobiologist Leo M. Chalupa's dangerous idea:

# A 24-hour period of absolute solitude

Our brains are constantly subjected to the demands of multi-tasking and a seemingly endless cacophony of information from diverse sources. Cell phones, emails, computers, and cable television are omnipresent, not to mention such archaic venues as books, newspapers and magazines.

This induces an unrelenting barrage of neuronal activity that in turn produces long-lasting structural modification in virtually all compartments of the nervous system. A fledging industry touts the virtues of exercising your brain for self-improvement. Programs are offered for how to make virtually any region of your neocortex a more efficient processor. Parents are urged to begin such regimes in preschool children and adults are told to take advantage of their brain's plastic properties for professional advancement. The evidence documenting the veracity for such claims is still outstanding, but one thing is clear. Even if brain exercise does work, the subsequent waves of neuronal activities stemming from simply living a modern lifestyle are likely to eradicate the presumed hard-earned benefits of brain exercise.

My dangerous idea is that what's needed to attain optimal brain performance — with or without prior brain exercise — is a 24-hour period of absolute solitude. By absolute solitude I mean no verbal interactions of any kind (written or spoken, live or recorded) with another human being. I would venture that a significantly higher proportion of people reading these words have tried skydiving than experienced one day of absolute solitude.

Link to complete list of respondents, and their answers.

Science can be a risky game, as Galileo learned to his cost. NowJohn Brockman asks over a hundred thinkers, “What is your most dangerous idea?”... more»

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Respondents include many whose work has appeared on Boing Boing before, including: J. Craig Venter, Sherry Turkle, Danny Hillis, Jaron Lanier, Rodney Brooks, David Gelernter, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Rudy Rucker, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, and Clifford Pickover.

Christmas brings with it the ultimate suspension of disbelief: a virgin birth of the Son of God. And a lack of substantial evidence to back up this claim seems to be no barrier to the belief of millions of Christians.

But when it comes to asking leading lights of science and medicine how they square belief with scientific fact, you might imagine a different story.

Body&Soul asked leading experts in their fields: “What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it?” The answers reveal unsubstantiated, but nevertheless influential, theories from yodelling ancestors to winning formulas for artistic achievement.

Belief appears to motivate even the most rigorously scientific minds. It stimulates and challenges, it tricks us into holding things to be true against our better judgment, and, like scepticism — its opposite — it serves a function in science that is playful as well as thought-provoking.

SARAH-JAYNE BLACKMORE 

Cognitive neuroscientist 

I believe that I have free will over the decisions I make, but I can’t prove it because all the scientific evidence is to the contrary. Like everyone else, I deceive myself that I have it. This is because human beings are designed to think that they have freedom over their actions. In fact, our brain makes decisions before making us conscious we have made them. For instance, the part of the brain that controls movement is active up to one second before we are aware of deciding to move. Afterwards, another part of the brain provides an explanation of why the movement was made. So, although I am able to rationalise why I did something after the event, my brain is always one step ahead.

ARMAND LEROI 

Evolutionary biologist 

I believe but I cannot prove that the first song ever sung by a human being was a yodel, a song relying on the voice fluctuating from falsetto to normal pitch.

My latest project is attempting to reconstruct the history of human song with the help of the musician Brian Eno. Our starting point is that songs — from polyrhythmic chants of Xhosa farmers to the nasal cries of Lisbon fadistas — contain information that tells us how humans migrated from Africa more than 60,000 years ago and constructed the diverse cultural world we see today. I believe that songs are the product of a history that can be retrieved if you listen to them. I ’m trying to understand songs as geneticists understand genes or linguists interpret language. If these very different human attributes are ruled by Darwinian dynamics, might not music be, too?

Perhaps. But a yodel as the first human song? The idea seems absurd. But the yodel is not only found among Swiss goat herders; it can also be heard in Congo’s jungles and the Kalahari desert, in the songs of the Mbuti pygmies and San Bushmen. It is among these peoples that I suspect the origin of human song may be found. Of course, I can prove none of this — yet.

LORD WINSTON

Fertility expert 

I believe but I cannot prove that religiousness is, in part, genetically determined. The strongest reason for my belief is provided by the study of twins by the behavioural geneticist Thomas Bouchard in the 1980s. It gave insight into which aspects of the human condition are nature and which nurture. But I don’t think genes are the only contributing factor. Bouchard’s study, and recent research by psychologists, shows that religious background and parental influence provide environmental influences; in other words, extrinsic religiosity, based on the rewards of churchgoing, such as a sense of belonging. Intrinsic religiosity is a deeper feeling of spirituality, not related to churchgoing. This, I believe, is genetically determined. This belief neither denies nor proves the existence of God. For all we know, it was God who put the genes there.

ALISON MURDOCH 

Professor of reproductive medicine 

I believe that life does not begin at conception, but I have no proof. I am an atheist and I believe in the sanctity of life but not that there is a higher spirit up there creating it. I don’t think there is a magic moment when life begins. I favour a gradualist approach. Once a baby is born, it is an individual. But there’s a time before that when it is still part of the woman who is carrying it. At the very early stages of pregnancy, she has the right to make decisions about it. As the pregnancy develops, the growing infant acquires its independent rights.

While I respect the value of a fertilised egg because it has the capacity to create a baby, I do not look on it in the same way that I would regard a child. Life should be respected differently at different stages. A fertilised egg is not a life; it is a potential life. I can’t prove this, but my work is based on it. If I felt that every fertilised egg that I created for IVF was an individual person, I couldn’t do my job. We create hundreds of embryos every week; eight to ten for each person, only ever using two.

GABRIEL DOVER 

Geneticist 

I believe but I cannot prove that the biological basis of our individuality is not knowable. My theory is that the unique form, mind and behaviour of each one of us is due to net- works of interaction between our estimated 25,000 genes.

This process is highly particular and utterly unpredictable. Even if we were given a print out of the structure of our genes at conception, we would not be able to say how they would connect in the making of an individual, despite much hype to the contrary.

Our development is not hardwired. A single gene, even one related to genetic diseases, has no meaning outside the context of its networks with hundreds of other genes. So, my belief is that there is no fixed or natural link between genes and traits. This gives a unique take on what it means to be human; when Samuel Beckett wrote “I alone am man” he was right.

JOHN BROCKMAN 

Editor of The Edge, a scientific debate website 

I believe but I cannot prove that we are moving towards a future full of correct answers but this may cause us to lose our ability to ask the right questions. In this age of “search culture”, with Google and other search engines leading us towards unlimited information, we focus on knowing, on ideas of truth and proof.

Many people welcome these technological advances as the first steps toward a universal library. My concern is that we are moving forward blinded by a naive sense of certainty.

When I asked this same question about belief and proof as the annual Edge question (www.edge.org), last year, the responses pointed to the new ways of understanding the world: advances in physics, information technology, genetics and neurobiology. But the researchers behind these new developments did not achieve success by having answers: they asked the right questions.

SUSAN GREENFIELD 

Neuroscientist and pharmacologist 

I believe in the final triumph of the good guy. It’s totally unprovable and sounds awfully moral, but it drives me. I think being honest and kind, and living by your principles, wins through in the end, even if it doesn’t seem expedient at the time. This challenges the notion that human beings are corrupt and inherently nasty, committed only to furthering their own causes by realpolitik.

It has led me to consider what a belief is and why people hold them, sometimes even die for them, without any proof.

But belief can obstruct science; it can prevent you examining the evidence properly. Think of how men have argued over the centuries that women are less intellectually capable than men. However, it can also guide you towards an idea. Giving in to a hunch can be the best thing a scientist can do; we shouldn’t underestimate the power of intuition.

SIR ARNOLD WOLFENDALE 

Former Astronomer Royal 

I believe but I cannot prove that God exists. As a scientist as well as a Christian, I know that I am supposed to require firm knowledge for every phenomenon in which I believe, but with religious belief, the potential benefits are great enough for normal critical attitudes to be suspended. All this is not to say that I accept all of Christianity lock, stock and barrel. Indeed, I hope that it evolves, as some of the Christian dogmas seem to be in need of an overhaul.

RAYMOND TALLIS 

Gerontologist and philosopher 

I believe so many things without proof that I am spoilt for choice. As Karl Popper pointed out, no belief can be legitimately placed beyond the reach of doubt. There is always the possibility of further observations that may prove it wrong. Take, for instance, the statement: “All swans are white.” It looked pretty unassailable until visitors to Australia reported sightings of black swans. And if I extend the notion of reasonable doubt virtually everything within the borders of our known world can be doubted.

Here are two of my most stubborn beliefs: first, that the material objects which populate my world are not just the sum total of my experience of them. Some philosophers argue that you can reduce objects to the personal interaction you have with them; outside of that, they don’t exist. I believe the opposite. I believe — despite proof that still confounds the brightest philosophical minds — that material objects exist outside of my own relationship with them. Second, I believe that our all-too-human religions, which are organised around an all-too-human idea of God, have nothing significant to say about how things really are, compared with our everyday perceptions.

SIR JOHN KREBS 

Principal of Jesus College, Oxford 

I believe that Mozart was a better composer than Carl Stamitz, a lesser-known contemporary. I do not know how I would prove this, or any other kind of aesthetic superiority. If public reaction to a musician was enough, that would solve it but, if an independent objective proof is required, it’s close to impossible. There is a chance that one day we will arrive at a formula that will explain why music X is better than music Y. We may discover that certain music elicits a larger release of serotonin in listeners. Alternatively, that a brilliant painting sends certain messages from the retina to the brain.But I doubt it very much. Nor do I think it would be a good thing. By reducing art to science, you risk losing the essence of what you are trying to explain. In other words, the X-factor that makes it superior. Art involves individual judgment and, therefore, it’s not quantifiable. The only good thing would be that I’d be able to find other composers I’d like by applying the magic formula.

Sir John Krebs is the speaker at the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures, from December 26-30. To book, visit www.rigb.org

EDZARD ERNST 

Professor of complementary medicine 

I don’t believe in anything that I can’t prove. My only true belief is in science and its ability to sort out belief from fact. Part of my fascination with alternative therapies stems from the fact that some of them have not yet been proved. My job is to establish whether or not they are evidence-based. There is no aspect of belief in this at all. If there is, it gets in the way and becomes a bias. Once you have tested and established your hypothesis, you try to disprove it. If you can’t, you do the test again before you consider believing it. If you find the results contradict your belief, you abandon it — or you’re a fool. This is why I am convinced of the power of placebo. I have done trials with patients who suffer from intractable pain. A portion of them, who were seen by actors pretending to be spiritual healers, improved so significantly that some were able to abandon their wheelchairs. This is this kind of proof I look for before I believe in something.

What We Believe But Cannot Prove, edited by John Brockman, published by Free Press (£9.99), is available from Times Books First at £9.49 p&p is free. Call 0870 1608080 or visitwww.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

...One report, by the prominent neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego, even suggested that mirror neurons could be involved when people understand metaphors.

These are early days for research into mirror neurons, but Ramachandran predicted in a 2000 essay (available online at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html) that they ''will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."

They could even help explain how language emerged in early humans, he argued in the essay. ...

Daniel Gilbert, in an essay The Vagaries of Religious Experience posted at edge.org, says, "things can be viewed in many ways, but human brains like the most rewarding view and thus they search for and hold on to that view whenever they can." He is writing primarily about religious belief, but the observation is broader.

For instance, he says, "a significant portion of those who survive major traumas not only do well, but claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience."

In Brockman's intentions, this running fire of a provocative and fascinating thesis should provoke a healthy optimism. The "new humanists" of his book are those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. Their turn then to speak: biologists, computer scientists, geographers, physicists, astronomers, inventors outline in a few pages their own experience and ideas.

The "third culture" invoked by John Brockman is now an absolute necessity. We can't stand unproductive fences and mutual misunderstandings anymore.

[From a review of I Nuovi Umanisti (The New Humanists), Garzanti Libri — the best of Edge — now available in a book.]

What do you believe to be true but cannot prove?   And what kind of problem does that pose to Scientists?  Professor Richard Dawkins joins us for that and we invite your thoughts on the subject.

Fi Glover, Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4: Now, what do you believe is true, but cannot prove? This enormous query has been posed by the big thinkers' website edge.org as their question for 2005. Now the website is the technological organ of The Edge Foundation, which set itself up in 1988 with the mandate to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society. And so far hundreds of big thinkers have been answering this question.

[male voice:] What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it? Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it. It may be that it's okay not to be certain, but to have a hunch and to perceive on that basis.

BBC Radio 4: Well, the author and the novelist Ian McEwen gave the site the following answer:

[male voice:] What I believe, but cannot prove, is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given—true, but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought, as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life—a better, more important life—elsewhere".

BBC Radio 4: And here's the response from Dan Dennett, who is a philosopher at Tufts University:

[male voice:] "I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness. It would follow that non-human animals and pre-linguistic children, although they can be sensitive, alert, responsive to pain and suffering, are not really conscious in this strong sense. This assertion is shocking to many people, who fear it would demote animals and pre-linguistic children from moral protection, but this would not follow."

BBC Radio 4: Well, now it's your turn. We at Broadcasting House would love your thoughts on this. Perhaps you could send them whilst I chat amicably to Professor Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. Very good morning, Professor.

Professor Richard Dawkins: Good morning.

BBC Radio 4: What was your own response to the question?

Richard Dawkins: Well, my response was about Darwinism, which is my own field. Darwinism is the explanation for life on this planet, but I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe. That was my response.

BBC Radio 4: So this might take us toward a discussion of faith and the notion of faith. And being able to prove the substance of that faith is particularly relevant at the moment. I mean the Archbishop of Canterbury last week alluded to the fact that the tsunami should make every Christian question the existence of God. Would you or could you follow the same path of thinking, given what you have just told us. 

Richard Dawkins: I think first one should say that the Archbishop of Canterbury was traduced and maligned by various people who said that he had questioned his own faith in God, which of course he did not. He said something much more cautious than that. And I'm sure he's right that this will cause people to question their faith in God.

However, the Edge question is about beliefs that are true even though you can't prove them. Faith is obviously an aspect of that and quite a number of the responses were beliefs that probably will be proved one way or the other one day, but we don't have yet the evidence to prove them. For example, more than one person conjectured that there was life elsewhere in the universe than here and that's a belief which doesn't require faith; it's something which in principle one day could be demonstrated.

On the other hand, if somebody said, "I believe that the way you see red is the same as the way I see red," then that seems to me to be in principle unprovable, which is a different kind of unproveability.

BBC Radio 4: It is a fantastically stimulating question isn't it? And although we might believe that science acts as a bastion of provable theory in a world that contains many mysteries, as you've just said, this often isn't the case, is it? Scientists start out with theories and seek to build the proof around them. And that's the excitement of science often.

Richard Dawkins: Very much so. It would be entirely wrong to suggest that science is something that knows everything already. Science proceeds by having hunches, by making guesses, by having hypotheses, sometimes inspired by poetic thoughts, by aesthetic thoughts even, and then science goes about trying to demonstrate it experimentally or observationally. And that's the beauty of science; that it has this imaginative stage but then it goes on to the proving stage, to the demonstrating stage.

BBC Radio 4: The Edge foundation, and the website, makes this statement that great minds can guess the proof before they have evidence or arguments for it. But is it only great minds? Don't most people function on a series of things they believe to be true, but never even seek to prove.

Richard Dawkins: Well, they do; you've got to be very careful about that because a lot of people really do simply assume things to be true, without really having any evidence, and that can be very dangerous. So, these intuitive feelings always should be followed up by an attempt to gather evidence. We should never go to war, we should never take drastic action on the basis of what we just, as a matter of faith, believe.

BBC Radio 4: One of our listeners, Adam, has sent us the following this morning; I wonder whether you could cast your big brain over it. He says, "I believe there is no such thing as time, even though we experience progression; in fact it is because there is no time that we can experience progression, and this includes acceleration and travel".

Richard Dawkins: Well that's fascinating. One of the contributors, I forget which, did actually say something rather similar and I think it's also the thesis of the physicist Ian Barbour in his rather stimulating book on the subject of time. This is a subject for a physicist to answer, rather than me. I guess that your correspondent probably is a physicist, actually. I think that physicists do have a rather different view of time from the view that we in the common sense word have.

BBC Radio 4: Another one comes from Margaret, who says, "I believe, but cannot prove that most of the viewing audience of Jerry Springer the Opera watched as a result of the protest and the protesters shot themselves in the foot." Would you agree?

Richard Dawkins: [Laughs] Well, that's a nice opinion and I think I do agree with that, but that's not of the same type as one of these statements that are true although you can't prove it. That's an opinion.

BBC Radio 4: Yes. It's just delightful to talk to you, Professor Dawkins; thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning.

We'd love to hear some more of your thoughts on this; what is it that you believe, but can't prove. Please send all of those to [email protected].

Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question. It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world. 

We all have hunches, beliefs we can barely explain, or even simply hopes or dreams that some might think of as crazy, or scoff at as irrational, or unproven. But that's just the point of hunches, isn't it? Sometimes we're even right. Diderot called the gift of those who guess the truth before being able to prove it the "esprit de divination".

Which is why the latest "grand question" posed by the publisher of the scientific website edge.org, John Brockman, to 120 scientists and thinkers, is so wonderful: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

The answers, which spill to 60,000 words and were published this week, provide a fascinating insight into conjecture - and the power of imagination. Even the empirically driven, it seems, have their own leaps of faith.

Many scientists and researchers believe in the unseen and the unknown - in true love, the power of a child's mind, in the existence of aliens.

Joseph LeDoux, a New York neuroscientist, said the question was easy: "I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it." Alison Gopnik, a Berkeley psychologist, wrote: "I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are."

The unproven belief of the Sydney physicist Paul Davies was that the universe is "teeming with life": "I make this sweeping claim because life has produced mind, and through mind beings who do not merely observe the universe, but have come to understand it through science, mathematics and reasoning. This is hardly an insignificant embellishment on the cosmic drama, but a stunning and unexpected bonus. Somehow life is able to link up with the basic workings of the cosmos, resonating with the hidden mathematical order that makes it tick. And that's a quirk too far for me."

My favourite answer came from David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas, who has spent two decades studying human mating. He has documented "phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery". He has studied "mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers". But, he wrote, "Throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

"While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well travelled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerising attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. ... It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists."

Curious, isn't it, that the most important things in life can elude the abacus, the microscope, the hard drive, emboldening and frustrating the empirically driven. But we know they exist.

In his introduction, Brockman wrote that the answers were "a commentary on how we are dealing with the idea of certainty". We are in an age of "searchculture", he wrote, where Google and other search engines are leading us towards both correct answers and a naive sense of certainty: "In the future, we will be able to answer the question, but will we be bright enough to ask it? This is an alternative path. It may be that it's OK not to be certain, but to have a hunch, and to perceive on that basis."

I'm not sure why that is such a comforting thought in January 2005, when we are stomaching a planet not just of terrorism, war and a wilting environment, but a tsunami that swallowed villages, islands and hearts whole. The world, both natural and man-made, seems brutal and nonsensical. It's hard to sustain belief in much (except, paradoxically, in that which sustains us) and this week - particularly since the thoughtless and ill-timed comments of Phillip Jensen, the Anglican Dean of Sydney, that "disasters of this world are part of God's warning that judgement is coming" - there has been chest-beating worldwide about how God could allow such devastation to occur, and how the deaths of 155,000 people can possibly make sense.

What is curious is how the incomprehensibility and uncertainty push people not away from, but towards, faith. And how many more have shadowed church doors since September 11, 2001, and Bali, and now the tsunami.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the difference between the poet and the mathematician was that the poet merely tried to get his head into the clouds while the mathematician tried to get the clouds into his head - and it was his head that split. A theology of conflict, which assumes to know the the mind of God, at a time of immense suffering, seems to me to be a split head.

All we can continue to do is defiantly believe - whether it is that animals have feelings, infants have souls, love can last forever, miracles occur, God is love. That the true expression of the face of God in the midst of horror is to stubbornly, and consistently, care for each other. On a personal note, this will be my last column for some time. I am going to Boston to take up a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and will return in June. To all those readers who have sent emails and letters over the past three years, and provoked me to think, laugh, and mull over different points of view - thank you