Edge in the News

El compositor John Cage se inclinó desde el otro lado de la mesa y me entregó una copia deCybernetics, de Norbert Wiener. Era 1966. Estábamos en una cena semanal de jóvenes artistas en casa del pionero del grupo Fluxus, Dick Higgins. Cage solía preparar la comida -un plato de champiñones- y debatíamos sus últimas ideas. Me habían invitado a conocer a Cage por mi trabajo en el Expanded Cinema Festival de la Film-maker's Cinematheque de Nueva York, un programa de actuaciones a finales de 1965 presentadas por artistas, bailarines, poetas, cineastas e intérpretes de happenings, en las que el hilo conductor era la incorporación del cine en su trabajo.

El pintor Robert Rauschenberg montó un collage cinético, una versión viviente de sus famosas piezas artísticas de la década de 1960. El escultor Claes Oldenburg presentó un proyector de cine de curioso diseño que parecía una esfinge. El videoartista Nam June Paik, subido en una escalera detrás de una gran pantalla opaca durante horas, fue cortando lentamente un cuadrado que le iba dejando al descubierto ante el público. Yo estaba sentado junto a Joan Miró, que se encontraba en la ciudad por una cena en su honor aquella noche en el Museo de Arte Moderno. A pesar de los ruegos del director del museo, no hubo quien moviese a Miró y se quedó durante toda la actuación.

Fue durante ese periodo cuando por primera vez tuve conocimiento de la ciencia. Los artistas, a diferencia de sus homólogos literarios, sentían un ávido interés por los científicos, y les leían. Empecé a leer a los físicos Jeans, Eddington, Einstein y poetas como Wallace Stevens, que manifestaban una profunda comprensión de las ideas científicas. Recibí una invitación para conocer a Marshall McLuhan. Recuerdo que hablamos mucho sobre su tema de que el arte puede servir como faro: un distante y temprano sistema de aviso que puede decir a la vieja cultura lo qué está empezando a ocurrir, interpretar lo que los científicos están haciendo. El valor no estaba en la explicación o en la popularización de la ciencia; más bien residía en la descripción, en hacer visibles las preguntas que formulaban los científicos.

En la primavera de 1966 organicé el que quizá fuera el primer encuentro entre arte y ciencia, cuando A. K. Soloman, presidente del departamento de Biofísica de Harvard, me pidió que llevara a un grupo de artistas, que habían sido colegas de Wiener, fallecido en 1964, a Cambridge para reunirlos con científicos de Harvard y del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Entre los participantes estaban Walter Rosenblith, Anthony Oettinger y Harold Edgerton. Conservo dos vivos recuerdos del acontecimiento. Primero, que la reunión fue un completo desastre, ya que artistas y científicos tenían pocos puntos en común sobre los que mantener un debate. Segundo, nos condujeron a un edificio en el que nos vimos enfrentados a un recinto elevado unos 30 centímetros, detrás del cual había científicos y técnicos con bata y guantes blancos. Iban de acá para allá con el ordenador. En ese preciso momento supe adónde me encaminaba.

En 1992, en un ensayo titulado The Emerging third culture, expuse el siguiente argumento: "La tercera cultura consiste en aquellos científicos y otros pensadores del mundo empírico que, a través de su trabajo y de sus escritos expositivos, ocupan el lugar de los intelectuales tradicionales al hacer visibles los significados más profundos de nuestra vida y redefinir quién y qué somos. Durante los últimos años, el terreno de juego de la vida intelectual estadounidense ha cambiado, y los intelectuales tradicionales han quedado cada vez más marginados. Una educación de la década de 1950 en Freud, Marx y el modernismo no es una cualificación suficiente para un pensador de la de 1990. De hecho, los intelectuales estadounidenses tradicionales son, en cierto sentido, cada vez más reaccionarios, y orgullosamente (y perversamente) ajenos a muchos de los logros intelectuales verdaderamente importantes de nuestro tiempo. Su cultura, que desdeña la ciencia, a menudo no es empírica. Utiliza su propia jerga y lava sus propios trapos sucios. Se caracteriza fundamentalmente por el comentario sobre comentarios, la fuerte espiral de observaciones que acaba llegando a un punto en el que se pierde el mundo real".

Actualmente, esa cultura fósil sigue en declive, sustituida por la incipiente "tercera cultura" del título del ensayo, una referencia a la celebrada división que planteó C. P. Snow del mundo del pensamiento en dos culturas: la del intelectual literario y la del científico. Lo que presenciamos en 1992 fue la entrega del testigo de un grupo de pensadores, los intelectuales literarios tradicionales, a un nuevo grupo, los intelectuales de la nueva tercera cultura. Desde entonces, lo que tradicionalmente se había denominado "ciencia" se ha convertido en "cultura pública". Como ha señalado Stewart Brand: "La ciencia es la única noticia".

Hoy tenemos nuevas y radicales formas de entender los sistemas físicos, y de pensar en el pensamiento que ponen en duda muchas de nuestras suposiciones básicas. Una biología realista de la mente, los avances en la física, la tecnología de la información, la neurobiología y la química de los materiales cuestionan supuestos básicos sobre lo que significa ser humano. Por primera vez, tenemos las herramientas y la voluntad para emprender el estudio científico de la naturaleza humana. Algo nuevo flota en el aire: nuevas formas de comprender los sistemas físicos, nuevos intereses que nos llevan a cuestionar muchos de nuestros fundamentos. Una biología realista de la mente, los avances en la física, la tecnología de la información, la genética, la neurobiología, la ingeniería, la química de los materiales: todas son cuestiones de importancia capital con respecto a lo que representa ser humano.

En 2005, la tercera cultura está viva y en buen estado, e impulsa el reconocimiento de esta evolución. Pueden encontrarse pruebas de ello. En el mercado, la gente vota con la cartera. Los libros de Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Brian Greene, Stephen Pinker, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees y E. O. Wilson no sólo son lecturas indispensables, sino también grandes ventas. En lo relativo a la ciencia, la tercera cultura es de alto relieve: el genetista J. Craig Venter intenta crear genes sintéticos como respuesta a nuestras necesidades energéticas; el biólogo Robert Trivers explora la base evolutiva del engaño y el autoengaño en la naturaleza humana; el biólogo Ian Wilmut, que clonó a la oveja Dolly, utiliza la transferencia nuclear para producir células madre embrionarias para investigar; el cosmólogo Lee investiga la evolución darwiniana del universo; el físico cuántico Seth Lloyd intenta crear ordenadores cuánticos; el psicólogo D. Hauser examina nuestra moralidad, y los informáticos Sergey Brin y Larry Page, de Google, alteran tanto el modo en que buscamos información como nuestra forma de pensar.

La tercera cultura es un concepto con mentalidad científica; no es propiedad de nadie. Otros parten de estos fundamentos y aplican su propia visión. Éste ha sido el caso de Kosmopolis, el Festival Internacional de Literatura de Barcelona, que ayer se clausuró, en el que la ciencia se sentó a la mesa con Marc D. Hauser, Lee Smolin y Robert Trivers, que presentaron sus ideas como parte de un programa global "que va desde la luz duradera de Cervantes a la (ambigua) crisis del formato libro, desde un trazado literario del barrio barcelonés del Raval hasta el dilema planteado por la influencia de Internet en la cocina de la escritura, y desde la aparición de un nuevo humanismo de la tercera cultura hasta las prácticas que sitúan a la literatura en el centro de la creatividad".

Está naciendo de la tercera cultura una nueva filosofía natural, cimentada en la comprensión de la importancia de la complejidad, de la evolución. Los sistemas muy complejos -ya sean organismos, cerebros, la biosfera o el propio universo- no se construyeron siguiendo un diseño; todos han evolucionado. Existe una nueva serie de metáforas para describirnos, a nuestra mente, al universo y a todas las cosas que conocemos, y son los intelectuales con estas nuevas ideas e imágenes los que impulsan nuestros tiempos.

he main thesis of this book is very interesting and challenging: modern science is blowing fresh air into the contemporary cultural agenda, making a very important contribution, sparkling and polychromatic. (...) A book like this one may be read in many different ways, following different propensities and needs. I was enlightened by the windows it opens on our future.

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

What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. Here are excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday atwww.edge.org.

Roger Schank
Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning"

Irrational choices.

I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.

Richard Dawkins 
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale"

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, 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.

Judith Rich Harris
Writer and developmental psychologist; author, "The Nurture Assumption"

I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three - not two - selection processes were involved in human evolution.

The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.

The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty - not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.

Kenneth Ford
Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The Quantum World"

I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.

I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there.

I believe in the existence of life elsewhere because chemistry seems to be so life-striving and because life, once created, propagates itself in every possible direction. Earth's history suggests that chemicals get busy and create life given any old mix of substances that includes a bit of water, and given practically any old source of energy; further, that life, once created, spreads into every nook and cranny over a wide range of temperature, acidity, pressure, light level and so on.

Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter.

Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University; author, "The Synaptic Self"

For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.

Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings.

There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist.

Lynn Margulis
Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution"

I feel that I know something that will turn out to be correct and eventually proved to be true beyond doubt.

What?

That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drumbeats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals.

David Myers 
Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition"

As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:

1. There is a God.

2. It's not me (and it's also not you).

Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.

And that is why I further believe that we should

a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!),

b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and

c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.

I've been browsing the "World Question Centre" at edge.org, the website for thinking folk with time on their hands. The 2005 Edgequestion is a good one: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

...Ian McEwan" makes a telling point. "What I believe but cannot prove," he says, "is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death." His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife "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." The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.

John Brockman, writer, publisher and events manager for the science elite, has asked a hundred researchers the question, What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? The answers are posted at his e-magazine Edge (www.edge.org), and they exert an unquestionable morbid fascination—those are the very ideas that scientists cannot confess in their technical papers.

Since the Big Bang, matter has been busy organizing itself on particles, atoms, stars, planets, organic compounds and (on Earth at least) bacteria, animals and conscious brains. That is what scientists think proved. But their unproven beliefs tell another story, or thousand others.

“I doubt that the Big Bang is the beginning of time, I strongly suspect that our history extends backwards before that”, writes in Edge Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist. He cannot prove it, but he believes it. As his colleague Lawrence Krauss believes, without proofs too, that “there are likely to be a large, and possibly infinite number of other universes out there, some of which may be experiencing Big Bangs at the current moment”.

God does not play dices, said Einstein, but Alexander Vilenkin thinks he played dices too much…

In a front-page article, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy's largest financial daily, announced the "Edge Question Forum" in "Domenica", the weekend Arts & Culture section. The Forum, an ongoing project designed to bring third culture thinking to Italy, features excerpts from the Edgeresponses in addition to articles solicited rom Italian humanist intellectuals and scientists.

History abounds with examples of how instinct, not data, led to discoveries. Even Einstein's theory of relativity had to wait decades for verification, says Ian McEwan

...This collection, mostly written by working scientists, does not represent the antithesis of science. These are not simply the unbuttoned musings of professionals on their day off. The contributions, ranging across many disparate fields, express the spirit of a scientific consciousness at its best - informed guesswork that is open-minded, free-ranging, intellectually playful.

Many replies offer versions of the future in various fields of study. Those readers educated in the humanities, accustomed to the pessimism that is generally supposed to be the mark of a true intellectual, will be struck by the optimistic tone. Some, like the psychologist Martin Seligman, believe we are not rotten to the core. Others even seem to think that the human lot could improve.

Generally evident is an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world which does not have an obvious equivalent in, say, cultural studies. In the arts, perhaps lyric poetry would be a kind of happy parallel.... [click here to continue]

Copyright © Ian McEwan, 2005. Excerpted in The Telegraph from Ian McEwan's introduction to What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, edited by John Brockman (UK: Free Press); (US: HarperCollins, forthcoming).

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'.
hich 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.