2002 : WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?

Why do we ask Edge questions?

Why do we ask Edge questions that challenge the "anesthesiology" of accepted wisdom and so the traditional answers we are given as to who and what we are? In most societies, accepted wisdom is to be respected not questioned, and who and what we are have long been decided by custom, elders, social betters and the sacred word of God. Moreover, why is it that the asking of Edge questions has only thrived and been encouraged in Western societies (with the help of such individuals as Socrates and the contributors to this Edge project)?

Children it should be noted readily ask Edge-type questions. The problem is that they stop when they become adults except in the civilization (with a few ups and downs) that started in Classical Greece — Western civilization.

"Are all our beliefs in gods, a myth, a lie foolishly cherished, while blind hazard rules the world?" That perhaps is the first Edge question (Euripides, Hecabe, lines 490-491) — and importantly a question not raised safely in private but before a large audience. Indeed, Euripides raised it to gain public reward. Greek playwrights wrote plays for competitions that were judged by ten randomly selected members of the audience — and given Euripides wanted to win — he must have believed that the average Greek would be hearing this Edge question raised about the Gods.

The public exploring of Edge questions is rare outside Western societies. Instead, "what was finally persuasive was appeal to established authority", and that, "the authority of tradition came to have more convincing effect than even direct observation and personal experience" (Robert Oliver, Communication And Culture In Ancient India And China, 1971). And as the Japanese scholar Hajime Nakamura noted, the Chinese "insisted that the traditional sacred books are more authoritative than knowledge based upon sense and inference" (Ways Of Thinking Of Eastern Peoples, 1964). Job might seem to be asking the Edge question "Why do the just suffer and the wicked flourish?" But the story of Job is not about rewarding Edge questioning but faith in the wisdom of God: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge".

This Edge question might be criticized as Eurocentric. But it was Western intellectuals that first asked the Edge question about whether ones own culture might be privileged falsely over others and so invented the idea of ethnocentricity.

So my Edge question is this: why is it only amongst adults in the Western world that has tradition been so insistently and constantly challenged by the raising of Edge questions?

The fact is that is "To be or not to be" is both a simple, perhaps the simplest, and a complex question, the hardest to sustain, let alone to ask. I ask it myself often — maybe as many times as five or six a week — and it is the asking, not any hope for an answer, that yields the most searing and immediate insight. I don't get it right every time, but when I do, I am thrown for a split second at the other side of being, the place where it begins.

But I can never retain that amazing feeling for long. What is required is a kind of radical pull-back of oneself from the most banal evidence of life and reality. Jean-Paul Sartre, after Shakespeare, was probably the thinker who framed the question best in his novels and philosophical treatises. The issue, however, is that this question is profoundly existential, not merely philosophical. It can be asked and should be by any living, thinking, sentient being, but cannot be answered.

There is huge energy and cognitive release to expect from it when it is properly framed. You have to somehow imagine that everything, absolutely everything has disappeared, or never was, that you have just happened upon your own circumstances by accident, the first accident of being. Another approach is to imagine sharply that anything that is, is a result of a warp, a blip in nothingness. It is not even a matter of finding out why or how, those demands are already far too elaborate. It is a crude, raw, brutal question followed by absolute, lightening speed amazement. And then the ordinary familiarity of all things known and named takes over, slipping your whole being into the stream of life, of being, with its attending problems and felicities. I feel strongly that there is a fundamental need for Shakespeare's question in every day life, but that is not what you and I were taught in school.

Of late, it is fashionable among leading physicists and cosmologists to suppose that alongside the physical world we see lies a stupendous array of alternative realities, some resembling our universe, others very different. The multiverse theory comes in several varieties, but in the most ambitious the "other universes" have different physical laws. Only in a tiny fraction of universes will the laws come out just right, by pure accident, for conscious beings such as ourselves to emerge and marvel at how bio-friendly their world appears.

The multiverse has replaced God as an explanation for the appearance of design in the structure of the physical world. Like God, the agency concerned lies beyond direct observation, inferred by inductive reasoning from the properties of the one universe we do see.

The meta-question is, does the existence of these other universes amount to more than an intellectual exercise? Can we ever discover that the hypothesized alternative universes are really there? If not, is the multiverse not simply theology dressed up in techno jargon? And finally, could there be a Third Way, in which the ingenious features of the universe are explained neither by an Infinite Designer Mind, nor by an Infinite Invisible Multiverse, but by an entirely new principle of explanation.

We all take for granted the fact that human beings ask questions and seek explanations, and that the questions they ask go far beyond their immediate practical concerns. But this insatiable human curiosity is actually quite puzzling. No other animal devotes as much time, energy and brain area to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Why? Is this drive for explanation restricted to the sophisticated professional questioners on this site? Or is it a deeper part of human nature?

Developmental research suggests that this drive for explanation is, in fact, in place very early in human life. We've all experienced the endless "whys?" of three-year-olds and the downright dangerous two-year-old determination to seek out strange new worlds and boldly go where no toddler has gone before. More careful analyses and experiments show that children's questions and explorations are strategically designed, in quite clever ways, to get the right kind of answers. In the case of human beings, evolution seems to have discovered that it's cost-effective to support basic research, instead of just funding directed applications. Human children are equipped with extremely powerful learning mechanisms, and a strong intrinsic drive to seek explanations. Moreover, they come with a support staff, — parents and other caregivers — who provide both lunch and references to the results of previous generations of human researchers.

But this preliminary answer prompts yet more questions. Why is it that in adult life, the same quest for explanatory truth so often seems to be satisfied by the falsehoods of superstition and religion? (Maybe we should think of these institutions as the cognitive equivalent of fast food. Fast food gives us the satisfying tastes of fat and sugar that were once evolutionary markers of good food sources, without the nourishment. Religion gives us the illusion of regularity and order, evolutionary markers of truth, without the substance.)

Why does this intrinsic truth-seeking drive seem to vanish so dramatically when children get to school? And, most important, how is it possible for children to get the right answers to so many questions so quickly? What are the mechanisms that allow human children to be the best learners in the known universe? Answering this question would not only tell us something crucial about human nature, it might give us new technologies that would allow even dumb adults to get better answers to our own questions.

Old questions don't go away (at least while they remain unanswered). Suppose Edge were to have asked Hamlet for his Y 2002 question We can guess the answer. "Sorry, John, I know it's a bit of a cliché, but it's the same question it has always been." Suppose Edge turned next to Albert Camus. "John, I said it in 1942 and I'm still waiting. 'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.'"

Clichés they may be.  But I'd say there's every reason for students of human nature to continue to treat these questions with due seriousness: and in particular to think further about who has been asking them,  when, and why, and with what consequences.  It may seem a paradox that human beings should have evolved to have a love-hate relationship with their own existence. But in fact there may be a simple Darwinian story to be told about how it has come to be  so.

Let's accept the stark truth that individual human beings have been designed by natural selection to be, in Dawkins' famous phrase, "survival machines" whose primary function is to help the genes they carry to make it into future generations. We should admit, then, that, from this evolutionary viewpoint, an  individual human life cannot be considered an end in itself but only a means to promoting the success of genes.

Yet the fact is that in the human case (and maybe the human case alone) natural selection has devised a peculiarly effective trick  for persuading individual survival machines to fulfill this seemingly bleak role. Every human being is endowed  with the mental programs for developing a "conscious self" or "soul": a soul which not only  values its own survival but  sees itself as very much an end in its own right  (in fact a soul which, in a fit of solipsism,  may even consider itself the one and only source of all the ends there are!). Such  a soul, besides doing all it can to ensure its own basic comfort and security, will typically strive for self-development: through learning, creativity, spiritual growth, symbolic expression,  consciousness-raising, and so on. These activities redound to the advantage of mind and body. The result is that such "selfish souls" do indeed make wonderful agents for "selfish genes".

There has, however,  always been a catch.  Naturally-designed "survival machines" are not, as the name might imply machines designed to go on and on surviving: instead they are machines designed to survive only up to a point —  this  being the point where the genes they carry have nothing more to gain (or even things to lose) from continued life.  For it"s a sobering fact that genes are generally  better off taking passage and propagating themselves in younger machines than older ones (the older ones will have begun to accumulate defects, to have become set in their ways, to have acquired more than enough dependents, etc.) It suits  genes therefore that their survival machines should have a limited life-time, after which they can be scrapped. 

Thus,  in a scenario that has all the makings of tragedy (if not a tragic farce),  natural selection has, on the one hand,  been shaping up individual human beings at the level of their souls to believe in themselves and their intrinsic worth, while on the other hand taking steps to ensure that these same individuals on the level of their bodies grow old and die —  and, most likely, since by this stage of a life the genes no longer have any interest in preventing it,  to die miserably, painfully and in a state of dreadful disillusion.

However,  here's the second catch. In order for this double-game that the genes are playing to be successful, it's essential that the soul they've designed does not see what's coming and realise the extent to which it has been duped, at least until too late. But this means preventing the soul, or at any rate cunningly diverting it,  from following some of the very lines of inquiry on which it has been set up  to place its hopes: looking to the future, searching for eternal truths, and so on. In Camus' words "Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined".

The history of human psychology and culture has revolved around this contradiction built into human nature. Science has not had much to say about it. But it may yet.

Last year, Steven Spielberg directed a film, based upon a Stanley Kubrick project, entitled "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". The film depicts a robotic child who develops human emotions. Is such a thing possible? Could a sufficiently complex and appropriately designed computer embody human emotions? Or is this simply a fanciful notion that the public and some scientists who specialize in artificial intelligence just wish could be true?

I don’t think that computers will ever become conscious and I view Spielberg’s depiction of a conscious feeling robot a good example of what might be called the "The Spielberg Principle" that states: When a Steven Spielberg film depicts a world-changing scientific event, the likelihood of that event actually occurring approaches zero." In other words, our wishes and imagination often have little to do with what is scientifically likely or possible. For example, although we might wish for contact with other beings in the universe as portrayed in the Spielberg movie "E.T", the astronomical distances between our solar system and the rest of the universe makes an E.T.-like visit extremely unlikely.

The film A.I. and the idea contained within it that robots could someday become conscious is another case in which our wishes exceed reality. Despite enormous advances in artificial intelligence, no computer is able to experience a pin prick like a simple frog, or get hungry like a rat, or become happy or sad like all of us carbon-based units. But why is this the case? It is my conjecture that this is because there are some features of being alive that makes mind, consciousness, and feelings possible. That is, only living things are capable of the markers of mind such as intentionality, subjectivity, and self-awareness. But the important question of the link between life and the creation of consciousness remains a great scientific mystery, and the answer will go a long way toward our understanding of what a mind actually is.

Scientific advances now make it possible for a woman past normal child-bearing years to bear a child. Some of my high-tech friends who range from age 43 to almost 50 are either bearing children or plan to using in-vitro techniques. These women have postponed childbearing because of their careers, but they want to experience the joys of family that their male counterparts were able to share while still pursuing their professional goals — an option far more difficult for the childbearer and primary care provider.

Many successful men start first, second, or third families later in their lives, so why should we criticize women who want to bear a first child, when, thanks to science, it is no longer "too late?"

We thought we had this one nailed. Believing (rightly) that the physical world is all there is, the sciences of the mind re-invented thought and reason (and feeling) as information-processing events in the human brain. But this vision turns out to be either incomplete or fatally flawed. The neat and tidy division between a level of information processing (software) and of physicality (implementation) is useful when we deal with humanly engineered systems. We build such systems, as far as possible, to keep the levels apart. But nature was not guided by any such neat and tidy design principles. The ways that evolved creatures solve problems of anticipation, response, reasoning and perceiving seem to involve endless leakage and interweaving between motion, action, visceral (gut) response, and somewhat more detached contemplation. When we solve a jigsaw puzzle, we look, think, and categorise: but we also view the scene and pieces from new angles, moving head and body. And we pick pieces up and try them out. Real on-the-hoof human reason is like that through and through. Even the use of pen and paper to construct arguments displays the same complex interweaving of embodied action, perceptual re-encountering, and neural activity. Mind and body (and world) emerge as messily and continuously coupled partners in the construction of rational action.

But this leads to a very real problem, an impasse that is currently the single greatest roadblock in the attempts to construct a mature science of the mind. We cannot, despite the deep and crucial roles of body and world, understand the mind in quite the same terms as, say, an internal combustion engine. Where minds are concerned, it is the flow of contents (and feelings) that seems to matter. Yet if we prescind from the body and world, pitching our stories and models at the level of the information flows, we again lose sight of the distinctively human mind. We need the information-and-content based story to see the mind as, precisely, a mind. Yet we cannot do justice to minds like ours without including body, world (cognitive tools and other people) and motion in roles which are both genuinely cognitive yet thoroughly physical.

What we lack is a framework, picture, or model in terms of which to understand this larger system as the cognitive engine. All current stories are forced to one side (information flows) or the other (physical dynamics). Cognitive Science thus stands in a position similar to that of Physics in the early decades of the 20th century. What we lack is a kind of 'quantum theory' of the mind: a new framework that displays mind as mind, yet as body in action too.

It feels to me like something very important is going on. Clearly our children aren't quite like us. They don't learn about the world as we did. They don't storehouse knowledge about the world as we have. They don't "sense" the world as we do. Could humanity possibly already be in the middle of a next stage of cognitive transition?

Merlin Donald has done a fine job of summarizing hundreds of inquiries into the evolution of culture and cognition in his Origins of the Modern Mind. Here, as in his other work, he posits a series of "layered" morphological, neurological and external technological stages in this evolutionary path. What he refers to as the "Third Transition" (from "Mythic" to "Theoretic" culture), appears to have begun 2500 (or so) years ago and has now largely completed its march to "mental" dominance worldwide.

While this last "transition" did not require biological adaptation (or speciation), it nonetheless changed us — neurologically and psycho-culturally. The shift from the "primary orality" of "Mythic culture" to the literacy and the reliance of what Donald calls an "External Symbolic Storage" network, has resulted in a new sort of mind. The "modern" mind.

Could we be "evolving" towards an even newer sort of mind as a result of our increasing dependence on newer sorts of symbolic networks and newer environments of technologies?

Literacy (while still taught and used) doesn't have anywhere near the clout it once had. Indeed, as fanatical "literalism" (aka "fundamentalism") thrashes its way to any early grave (along with the decline of the reciprocal fascination of the past 50 years to "deconstruct" everything as "texts"), how much will humanity care about and rely upon the encyclopedic storage of knowledge in alphabetic warehouses?

Perhaps we are already "learning," "knowing" and "sensing" the world in ways that presage something very different from the "modern" mind. Should we ask the children?

I've spent most of my career as a neurobiologist working on an area of the brain called the hippocampus. It's a fairly useful region — it plays a critical role in learning and memory. It's the area that's damaged in Alzheimer's, in alcoholic dementia, during prolonged seizures or cardiac arrest. You want to have your hippocampus functioning properly. So I've spent all these years trying to figure out why hippocampal neurons die so easily and what you can do about it. That's fine, might even prove useful some day. But as of late, it's been striking me that I'm going to be moving in the direction of studying a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

It's a fascinating part of the brain, the part of the brain that most defines us as humans. There's endless technical ways to describe what the PFC does, but as an informal definition that works pretty well, it's the closest thing we have to a superego. The PFC is what allows us to become potty trained early on. And it is responsible for squeezing our psychic sphincters closed as well. It keeps us from belching loudly at the quiet moment in the wedding ceremony, prevents us from telling our host just what we really think of the inedible meal they've served. It keeps us from having our murderous thoughts turn into murderous acts. And it plays a similar role in the cognitive realm — the PFC stops us from falling into solving a problem with an answer that, while the easier, more reflexive one, is wrong. The PFC is what makes us do the right thing, even if it's harder.

Not surprisingly, it's one of the last parts of the brain to fully develop (technical jargon — to fully myelinate). But what is surprising is just how long it is before the PFC comes fully on line — astonishingly, around age 30. And this is where my question comes in. It is best framed in the context of young kids, and this is probably what has prompted me to begin to think about the PFC, as I have two young children. Kids are wildly "frontally disinhibited," the term for having a PFC that hasn't quite matured yet into keeping its foot firmly on the brake. Play hide and seek with a three year old, loudly, plaintively call, "Where are you," and their lack of frontal function does them in — they can't stop themselves from calling out — Here I am, under the table — giving away their hiding spot. I suspect that there is a direct, near linear correlation between the number of fully myelinated frontal neurons in a small child's brain and how many dominoes you can line up in front of him before he must MUST knock them over.

So my question comes to the forefront in a scenario that came up frequently for me a few years ago: my then three year old who, while a wonderful child, was distinctly three, would do something reasonably appalling to his younger sister — take some stuffed animal away, grab some contested food item, whatever. A meltdown then ensues. My wife or I intervene, strongly reprimanding our son for mistreating his sister. And then the other parent would say, "Well, is this really fair to be coming down on him like this?, after all, he has no frontal function yet, he can't stop himself" (my wife is a neuropsychologist so, pathetically, we actually speak this way to each other). And the other would retort — "Well, how else is he going to develop that frontal function?"

That's the basic question — how does the world of empathy, theory of mind, gratification postponement, Kohlberg stages of moral development, etc., combine with the world of neurotrophic growth factors stimulating neurons to grow fancier connections? How do they produce a PFC that makes you do the harder thing because it's right? How does this become a life-long pattern of PFC function

Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness are the result of physical processes. But almost nobody else does. Common sense tells us that our mental life is the product of an immaterial soul, one that can survive the destruction of the body and brain. The physical basis of thought is, as Francis Crick put it, "an astonishing hypothesis", one that few take seriously.

You might think that this will soon change. After all, people once thought the earth is flat and that mental illness is caused by demonic possession. But the belief in the immaterial soul is different. It is rooted in our experience — our gut feeling, after all, is not that we are bodies; it is that we occupy them. Even young children are dualists — they appreciate and enjoy tales in which a person leaves his body and goes to faraway lands, or when the frog turns into a prince. And when they come to think about death, they readily accept that the soul lives on, drifting into another body or ascending to another world.

When the public hears about research into the neural basis of thought, they learn about specific findings: this part of the brain is involved in risk taking, that part is active when someone think about music, and so on. But the bigger picture is not yet generally appreciated, and it is an interesting question how people will react when it is. (We are seeing the first signs now, much of it in the recent work of novelists such Jonathan Franzen, David Lodge, and Ian McEwan). It might be that non-specialists will learn to live with the fact that their gut intuitions are mistaken, just as non-physicists accept that apparently solid objects are composed of tiny moving particles. But this may be optimistic. The notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling, in large part because of what it means for the idea of life after death. The same sorts of controversies that raged over the study and teaching of evolution in the 20th century might well spill over to the cognitive sciences in the years to follow.

Consider two universes. Universe Omega is a universe in which God does not exist, but the inhabitants of the universe believe God exists. Universe Upsilon is a universe in which God does exist, but no inhabitant believes God exists. In which universe would you prefer to live? In which universe do you think most people would prefer to live?

I recently posed this question to scientists, philosophers, and lay people. Some respondents suggested that if people think God exists, then God is sufficiently "real." A few individuals suggested that people would behave more humanely in a Universe where people believed in God. Yet others countered that an ethical system dependent on faith in a watchful, omniscient, or vengeful God is fragile and prone to collapse when doubt begins to undermine faith. A fuller listing of responses is in the book.

To me, the biggest challenge to answering this question is understanding what is meant by "God." Scientists sometimes think of God as the God of mathematical and physical laws and the underpinnings of the universe. Other people believe in a God who intervenes in our affairs, turns water into wine, answers prayers, and smites the wicked. The Koran implies that God lives outside of time, and, thus, our brains are not up to the task of understanding Him. Some theologians have suggested that only especially sensitive individuals can glimpse God, but us ordinary folk shouldn't deny His existence in the same way that a blind man shouldn't deny the existence of a rainbow. In modern times, many scientists ponder the amazing panoply of chemical and physical constants that control the expansion of the universe and seem tuned to permit the formation of stars and the synthesis of carbon-based life.

Questions about God's omniscience are particularly mind-numbing, yet we can still ask if it is rational to believe in an omniscient God. As Steven J. Brams points out in his book Superior Beings, "The rationality of theistic belief is separate from its truth — a belief need not be true or even verifiable to be rational." However, if we posit the existence of an omniscient God, His omniscience may require him to know the history of all quarks in the universe, the states of all electrons, the vibrations of every string, and the ripples of the quantum foam. Is this the same God, who in Exodus 21 gave Moses laws describing when one should stone an ox to death? Is the God of Gluons and Galaxies the same God concerned with Israeli oxen dung?

But what about the Bible itself? Today, the Bible — especially the Old Testament — may serve as an alternate reality device. It gives its readers a glimpse of other ways of thinking and of other worlds. It is also the most mysterious book ever written. We don't know the ratio of myth to history. We don't know all the authors. We are not always sure of the intended message. We don't fully understand the Old Testament's Nephilim or its Bridegroom of Blood. We only know that that the Bible reflects some of humankind's most ancient and deep feelings. For some unknown reason, it is a bell that has resonated through the centuries. It lets us reach across cultures, see visions, and better understand what we have held sacred. Because the Bible is a hammer that shatters the ice of our unconscious, it thus provides one of many mechanisms in our quest for transcendence.

This question was asked by my eight-year-old grandson George. In eight letters it summarizes the conundrum of personal existence in an impersonal universe. How does it happen that a couple of liters of grey matter organizes itself into the unique stream of self-awareness that calls itself George? If we could answer this question, we would be on the way toward an understanding of brain structure and function at a deep level. We would probably have in our hands the key to a more rational and discriminating treatment of mental illnesses. We might also have the key to the design of a genuine artificial intelligence.

Every human being must have asked this question in one way or another. For most of us, the question expresses only a general philosophical curiosity about our place in the order of nature. But for George the question has a more specific technical meaning. He has an identical twin brother Donald, and he understands the distinction between monozygotic and fraternal twins. He knows that he and Donald not only have the same genes but also have the same environment and upbringing. When George asks the question, he is asking how it happens that two people with identical genes and identical nurture are nevertheless different. What are the non-genetic and non-environmental processes in the brain that cause George to be George and cause Donald to be Donald? If we could answer this question, we would have a powerful new tool for the investigation of cognitive development. The conventional wisdom says that mental differences between George and Donald arise from local randomness of neural connections, undetermined either by genes or by sensory input. But to say that the connections are random only means that we do not yet understand how they came about.

This question needs to be asked because of the widely held conviction that we already know the answer to it. We don't. Okay, we know half of the answer: one of the reasons why people differ from each other is that they have different genes. That's the easy half.

The hard half is the part that isn't genetic. Even people who have identical genes, like Freeman Dyson's twin grandsons (see his question), differ in personality. I am not asking about the feeling each twin has of being "me": George and Donald could be identical in personality, and yet each could have a sense of me-ness.

But if George and Donald are like most identical twins, they aren't identical in personality. Identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins or ordinary siblings, but less alike than you would expect. One might be more meticulous than the other, or more outgoing, or more emotional. The weird thing is that the degree of similarity is the same, whether twins are reared together or apart. George and Donald, according to their grandfather, "not only have the same genes but also have the same environment and upbringing." And yet they are no more alike in personality than twins reared by two different sets of parents in two different homes.

We know that something other than genes is responsible for some of the variation in human personality, but we are amazingly ignorant about what it is and how it works. Well-designed research has repeatedly failed to confirm commonly held beliefs about which aspects of a child's environment are important. The evidence indicates that neither those aspects of the environment that siblings have in common (such as the presence or absence of a caring father) nor those that supposedly widen the differences between siblings (such as parental favoritism or competition between siblings) can be responsible for the non-genetic variation in personality. Nor can the vague idea of an "interaction" between genes and environment save the day. George and Donald have the same genes, so how can an interaction between genes and environment explain their differences?

Only two hypotheses are compatible with the existing data. One, which I proposed in my book The Nurture Assumption, is that the crucial experiences that shape personality are those that children have outside their home. Unfortunately, there is as yet insufficient evidence to support (or disconfirm) this hypothesis.

The remaining possibility is that the unexplained variation in personality is random. Even for reared-together twins, there are minor, random differences in their experiences. I find it
implausible, however, that minor, random differences in experiences could be so potent, given the ineffectiveness of substantial, systematic differences. If randomness affects personality, the way it probably works is through biological means — not genetic but biological. The human genome is smallish and the human brain is vast; the genome couldn't possibly contain precise specifications for every neuron and synapse. Identical twins don't have identical brains for the same reason that they don't have identical freckles or fingerprints.

If these random physical differences in the brain are responsible for some or all of the personality differences between identical twins, they must also be responsible for some or all of the non-genetic variation in personality among the rest of us. "All" is highly unlikely; "some" is almost certainly true. What remains in doubt is not whether, but how much.

The bottom line is that scientists will probably never be able to predict human behavior with anything close to certainty. Next question: Is this discouraging news or cause for celebration?

The God machine is the name that journalists have given to a device invented by the Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger. It consists of a bunch of solenoids that, when strapped around the head, deliver pulses of electromagnetic radiation to specific regions of the brain. Persinger claims he can induce mystical visions by stimulating the temporal lobes, which have also been linked to religious experiences by other scientists, notably V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego.

Persinger's machine is actually quite crude. It induces peculiar perceptual distortions but no classic mystical experiences. But what if, through further advances in neuroscience and other fields, scientists invent a God machine that actually works, that delivers satori, nirvana, to anyone on command, without any negative side effects? It doesn't have to be an electromagnetic brain-stimulating device. It could be a drug, a type of brain surgery, a genetic modification, or some combination thereof.

One psychedelic researcher recently suggested to me that enlightenment could be spread around the world by an infectious virus that boosts the brain's production of dimethyltryptamine, a endogenous psychedelic that the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health detected in trace amounts in human brain tissue in 1972. But whatever form the God machine takes, it would be powerful enough to transform the world into what Robert Thurman, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism (and father of Uma), calls the "Buddhaverse," a mystical utopia in which everyone is enlightened.

The obvious followup question: Would the invention of a genuine God machine spell our salvation or doom?

Here I paraphrase Einstein's famous question: "Did God have any choice in the creation of the Universe". I get rid of the God part, which Einstein only added to make it seem more whimsical, I am sure, because that just confuses the issue. The important question, perhaps the most important question facing physics today is the question of whether there is only one consistent set of physical laws that allow a working universe, or rather whether the constants of nature are arbitrary, and could take any set of values. Namely, if we continue to probe into the structure of matter and the nature of elementary forces will we find that mathematical consistency is possible only for one unique theory of the Universe, or not? In the former case, of course, there is hope for an exactly predictive "theory of everything". In the latter case, we might expect that it is natural that our Universe is merely one of an infinite set of Universes within some grand multiverse, in each of which the laws of physics differ, and in which anthropic arguments may govern why we live in the Universe we do.

The goal of physics throughout the ages has been to explain exactly why the universe is the way it is, but as we push closer and closer to the ultimate frontier, we may find out that in fact the ultimate laws of nature may generically produce a universe that is quite different from the one we live in. This would force a dramatic shift in our concept of natural law.

Some may suggest that this question is mere philosophical nonsense, and is akin to asking how many angels may sit on the head of a pin. However, I think that if we are lucky it may be empirically possible to address it. If, for example, we do come up with some fundamental theory that predicts the values of many fundamental quantities correctly, but that predicts that other mysterious quantities, like the energy of empty space, is generically different than the value we measure, or perhaps is determined probabilistically, this will add strong ammunition to the notion that our universe is not unique, but arose from an ensemble of causally disconnected parts, each with randomly varying values of the vacuum energy.

In any case, answerable or not, I think this is the ultimate question in science.

In mid-November 1999, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead published a commentary on the candidacy of Al Gore, and in it she gave us a new word. In the old days, candidates were advised in a pseudo-Freudian frame. Clinton, in pre-Monica times, was told to emphasize his role as "strong, assertive, and a good father." Now, however, this psychobabble has been eclipsed by what she called biobabble and Mead recommended that Gore's advice might best be based on evolutionary psychology instead of Freud. In other words, it wasn't your parents who screwed you up, it was the ancient environment. Mead cites Sarah Hrdy, a primatologist, as suggesting that the ideal presidential leader would be a grandma whose grandchildren were taken away and scattered across the country in secret locations. Then the president could be expected to act on the behalf of the general good, to maximize her reproductive fitness. No wonder Gore wasn't appointed.

This is déjà vu all over again, and after the last century of biopolicy in action, can we still afford to be here? Somehow we can't get away from a fixation on the link between biology and behavior. A causal relationship was long championed by the Mendelian Darwinians of the Western World, as breeding and sterilization programs to get rid of the genes for mental deficiencies became programs to get rid of the genes for all sorts of undesirable social behaviors, and then programs to get rid of the undesirable races with the imagined objectionable social behaviors. Science finally stepped back from the abyss of human tragedy that inevitably ensued, and one result was to break this link by questioning whether human races are valid biological entities. By now, generations of biological anthropologists have denied the biology of race. Arguing that human races are socially constructed categories and not biologically defined ones, biological anthropologists have been teaching that if we must make categories for people, "ethnic group" should replace "race" in describing them. 

The public has been listening. This is how the U.S. census came to combine categories that Americans base on skin color "African-American," delineated by "one drop of blood" with categories based on language "Latino." However ethnic groups revitalize the behavioral issue because ethnicity and behavior are indeed related, although not by biology, but by culture. This relationship is implicitly accepted as the grounds for the profiling we have heard so much about of late, but here is the rub. Profiling has accomplished more than just making it easier to predict behaviors, actually revitalizing the issue of biology and behavior by bringing back "race" as a substitution for "ethnic group." This might well have been an unintended consequence of using "race" and "ethnic group" interchangeably, because this usage forged a replacement link between human biology and human culture. Yet however it happened, we are back where we started, toying with the notion that human groups defined by their biology differ in their behavior.

And so, how do we get out of this? Can we? Or does the programming that comes shrink-wrapped with our state-of-the-art hardware continue to return our thinking to this point because of some past adaptive advantage it brought? It doesn't seem very advantageous right now.

Even with productivity showing startling increases as a consequence of new information technologies everything suggests that the gap between rich and poor is growing dramatically globally and even beginning to increase again in the U.S. So much for trickle down economics.

(As a poet, I don't think I need to explicate the question.)

In writing my next book, about maths, I have been led to ponder this question by the fact that there are philosophers, and a few mathematicians, who believe that it is conceivable that there could be intelligences with a fully developed mathematics that does not, for example, recognize the integers or the primes, let alone Fermat's Last Theorem or the Riemann Hypothesis. And yet, whole numbers seem to us such a basic property of "things", that unless there were intelligences that were not embodied in any way (and/or couldn't "see" the discrete stars, for example) they would be bound to come across number and all that follows. But then, I suppose you could imagine intelligent beings which consisted, say, of density differences in a gas but lacked boundaries separating one from another. In any case, if such creatures do exist, it rather pours cold water on the use by SETI of maths (e.g. prime x prime pictorial grids) to communicate with them

My question is to do with materialism, reductionism and the inertia of intellectual progress. It is also connected with the limitations of language as a mechanism for thought or, perhaps more accurately, of thought as a mechanism that defines and constrains language. Above all it is concerned with a 'process' view of the universe, which, although frequently espoused by many of us in this group, still somehow manages to remain trapped inside an older paradigm, like a butterfly that can't quite break free from its chrysalis skin.

It seems to me that we intuitively, linguistically and historically divide the world into tangible things, which we think of as real, and intangible things, to which we usually (or latterly) accord less respect. This is not really a valid distinction since, on closer inspection, all supposedly solid, substantial things turn out to be rather more ephemeral, distributed and transitive than we might like to think. The whole edifice of the universe, it seems, is constructed from interactions between smaller, simpler phenomena that are themselves only patterns of interactions between even simpler phenomena. There are no 'atoms' in the Greek sense. Our division of the world into objects, properties and structures is an artifice to help us deal with it, not a true description of reality. The universe is not divided into hardware and software: there is only software.

Life and Mind are perhaps the most obvious examples of things that subsist as pure process, but atoms, electrons, buildings and societies are in truth no different. To some extent we already know and understand this, and yet I think we can't stop ourselves from dividing hardware from software and treating the former as more real and significant than the latter. Even when we attempt to regard life and mind in a process way we often end up reifying them again as 'information' (as if information were a kind of substance) and end up missing the point.

Perhaps the most incapacitating aspect of our implicit reification of natural phenomena can be seen in a malignant form of reductionism. Benign reductionism — trying to understand something complex by first identifying the properties of its parts — is a valid and powerful tool, often the only one available to science. On the other hand, it often leads implicitly to a belief that something complex can be understood solely in terms of the properties of its parts, without reference to the relationships between those parts. It can easily be demonstrated that this is nonsense (perhaps almost the converse of the truth), and yet much of our present failure to understand nature rests on such a fallacy.

I believe we are edging towards a new paradigm, in which process and interaction — the verbs — are all there is, and material stuff — the nouns — are simply placeholders for more verbs. However, we don't yet have suitable language or mathematics for describing this new viewpoint, and we never will if we fail to recognise the reasons why we so easily slip back into our old ways. Before we can construct something new we must deliberately deconstruct what we have. So the first question I want to ask is: how is our understanding constrained by the apparatus we use for gaining that understanding? After that we can start to discuss what new kinds of language and mathematics might liberate us from this paradigm trap.

When Enrico Fermi asked his famous question (now known as the Fermi Paradox) more than fifty years ago — if there is advanced extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and technology, why don't we see unmistakable evidence of it? — it was the era of 60-megaton atmospheric bomb tests and broadcast television, with unlimited fusion power in plain sight.

Now, we don't even have underground testing, TV has gone cable, wireless is going spread-spectrum, technology has grown microscopic, our children encrypt text with PGP and swap audio via MP3, and Wolfman Jack no longer broadcasts across the New Mexico desert at 50,000 watts.

Fermi's question is still worth asking — and may not be the paradox we once thought.

Can contradictory things happen at the same time? Does the universe continue about its business when we're not looking at it? These questions have been raised in the context of quantum mechanics ever since the theory was formulated in the 1920s. While most physicists dismissed these issues as "just philosophical", a small minority (inspired by the examples of Louis de Broglie, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schroedinger) continued to question the meaning of the most successful theory of science, and often suffered marginalisation and even ridicule.

It is one thing to apply quantum mechanics to calculate atomic energy levels or the rate at which atoms emit light. But as soon as one asks what is actually happening during an atomic transition, quantum mechanics gives no clear answer. The Copenhagen interpretation, forged by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, emphasises the subjective experience of "observers" and avoids any description of an objective reality; it talks about the chances of different outcomes occuring in a measurement, but does not say what causes a particular outcome to occur. For decades, students have been taught to avoid asking probing questions. An attitude of "shut-up-and-calculate" has dominated the field. The result is widespread confusion, and a strange unwillingness to ask clear and direct questions. As the late cosmologist Dennis Sciama once put it, whenever the subject of the interpretation of quantum mechanics comes up "the standard of discussion drops to zero".

The publication of John Bell's book Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics in 1987 provided a point of reference for a change in attitude that gained real momentum in the 1990s.

Bell spearheaded a movement to purge physics of some inherently vague notions inherited from the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. For instance the "measurement apparatus" was treated by Bohr and Heisenberg as something fundamentally distinct from the "system being measured": the latter was subject to the laws of quantum mechanics whereas the former was not. But if everything — including our equipment — is made of atoms, how can such a distinction be anything more than an approximation? In reality everything — "system", "apparatus", even human "observers" — should obey the same laws of physics. The clarity of Bell's writings forced many people to confront the uncomfortable fact that quantum mechanics as usually formulated had a problem explaining why we see definite events taking place.

Bell advertised what he saw as two promising avenues to resolve the quantum paradoxes: the theory must be supplemented either with a new random process that selects outcomes (the "dynamical reduction of the state vector") or with extra "hidden variables" whose unknown values select outcomes. Theories of both types have been constructed. Indeed, a correct hidden — variables theory was written down by Louis de Broglie as long ago as 1927, and was shown by David Bohm in 1952 to account completely for quantum phenomena. The de Broglie — Bohm theory gave an objective account of quantum physics; yet, until about 10 years ago, most physicists had not heard of it. Today, many have heard of it, but still very few understand it or work on it. And it is still not taught to students (even though in my experience many students would love to know more about this theory).

One wonders where things will go from here. On the one hand, in the last five years the subject of the interpretation of quantum mechanics has suddenly become more respectable thanks to the rising technology of quantum information and computation, which has shown that something of practical use — novel forms of communication and computation — can emerge from thoughts about the meaning of quantum mechanics. But on the other hand, there is a danger that the problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics will be pushed aside in the rush to develop "real" technological applications of the peculiarities of quantum phenomena.

The rise of quantum information theory has also generated a widespread feeling that "information" is somehow the basic building block of the universe. But information about what? About information itself? As noted by P.W. Anderson in a recent Edge comment on Seth Lloyd, not only does it seem unjustified to claim that "information" is the basic stuff of the universe: worse, an unfortunate tendency has developed in some quarters to regard the theory of information as the only really fundamental area of reseach. Personally, I find quantum information theory very interesting, and it has without doubt enriched our understanding of the quantum world: but I fear that in the long run its most enthusiastic practitioners may lead us back to the vague subjectivist thinking from which we were only just emerging.

Two startling ideas about wholly different classes of objects emerged from general relativity: black holes and wormholes. For over half a century black holes have grown in importance, with many convincing candidates in the sky and a vast range of theoretical support. "Einstein bridges" as they were first called, emerged in the 1930s, yet have not met with nearly the attention they deserve. We still don't know if any were made in the early universe. That seems by far the easiest way to find one‹inherit it from the Big Bang‹because to be stable they demand exotic matter. Matt Visser's Lorentzian Wormholes (1996) details the many types of wormholes allowed by theory. It's an impressive range, mostly unexplored theoretically.

If they do exist, they could lead to interstellar travel--indeed, to instantaneous access to points at the far range of the universe. They would also confirm both general relativity and the discovery of exotic matter. But curiously little thought seems given to detecting wormholes, or theorizing about how small, stable ones might have evolved since the early universe. Several co-authors and I proposed using the Massive Compact Halo Object (MACHO) searches to reveal a special class--"negative mass" wormholes--since they would appear as sharp, two-peaked optical features, due to gravitational lensing (Physical Review D 51, p3117-20, 1995) So far all the two peaked cases found have been attributed to binary stars or companion planets, though the data fits are not very close.

Surely there could be other ways to see such exotic objects. Some thought and calculations about wormhole evolution might produce a checkable prediction, as a sidelight to an existing search. Further thought is needed about the implications that extra dimensions from string theory will have on wormholes. It seems theoretically plausible that the inflationary phase of the early universe might have made negative mass string loops framing stable Visser-type wormholes.

Perhaps wormholes do not exist. A plausible search that yielded nothing would still be a result, because we could learn something about the possibility of exotic matter. A positive result, especially detection of a wormhole we could reach with spacecraft, could change human history.

Surely, the right question it is not what was wrong before Sept.11th. The question mark to be unravelled is why on earth the western productive system has become all-dominant in the general pool of genes, or memes.

The unsolved question is what makes that system so efficient, so all-embracing that no other system or ideology can compete in this planet's race for improving the economic well being per capita. It must be infuriating for beleivers of so called alternative ways, to deal with poverty and collective happiness — in this end of live, I mean, am not talking about afterwards or beyond.

We know a bit about the actual mechanisms of the system — or rather, what economists call aggregate demand. We also infere some of the things which may influence the end product. But no attention is paid to the type of intelligence which is at the roots of the system's survival.

The answer might be that it is a self organizing system based on swarm intelligence. The nearest thing to that are construction setups and organization schemes by social insects like ants, bees and termites: A few, very simple rules, instead of preprogramming and centralized control; the right mixture of robustness and flexibility — just like DNA — hardly any supervising body at all.

Termites of the genus Macrotermes have the added advantage of responding, with due lags, to indirect stimulation from the environment, and not only from other workers. This kind of termites would quickly reduce by half the number of road accidents — the opposite practice of hominids — by diverting traffic towards the railways, just by looking at the death figures.

All this has to do with genetic knowledge. As to non-genetic factors, two are of paramount importance: the separation of State from Religion — it was tantamount to a free entry ticket for everybody in the decision making process — and the neat distinction between Theology and Philosophy (we call it now science); it opened the door to the technological revolution.

My hypothesis is that the modernist/post-modernist idea that beauty is a social construct (with no deep bedrock in reality) is dead.

There are an increasing number of books coming out propounding the notion that beauty is real and crosses all sorts of cultural and historic lines. In their view, that which unites us as a species in the perception of beauty is way larger than what divides us.

My big question is whether, in a disjointed world in which the search for meaning is becoming ever more important, the existence of widely agreed upon ideas of beauty will increasingly become a quick and useful horseback way of determing whether or not *any* complex system, human or technological, is coherent.

This idea draws in part from pre-industrial age definitions of beauty that held that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Keats, 1820), and most important, "The most general definition of beauty....multeity in unity" (Coleridge, 1814).

Interestingly enough, the idea that I view as increasingly dumb, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" Bartlett's dates only to 1878, which is about when the trouble started, in my view.

Unlike many ancient philosophical problems, this one has, paradoxically, been made both more urgent and less tractable by the gradual triumph of scientific rationality. Indeed, the prevailing modern attitude towards it is a sort of dogmatic despair: ‘you can‘t get an ought from an is, therefore morality must be outside the domain of reason‘. Having fallen for that non-sequitur, one has only two options: either to embrace unreason, or to try living without ever making a moral judgement. In either case, one becomes a menace to oneself and everyone else.

On the tape of the bin Laden dinner party, a participant states his belief that during the September 11 attack, Americans were afraid that a coup d’état was under way. Worldwide, tens of millions of people believe that the Israeli secret service carried out the attack. These are factual misconceptions, yet they bear the imprint of moral wrongness just as clearly as a fossil bears the imprint of life. This illustrates an important strand in the fabric of reality: although factual and moral assertions are logically independent (one cannot deduce either from the other), factual and moral explanations are not. There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.

Jacob Bronowski pointed out that a commitment to discovering scientific truth entails a commitment to certain values, such as tolerance, integrity, and openness to ideas and to change. But there‘s more to it than that. Not only scientific discovery, but scientific understanding itself can depend on one’s moral stance. Just look at the difficulty that creationists have in understanding what the theory of evolution says. Look at the prevalence of conspiracy theories among the supporters of bad causes, and how such people are systematically blind to rational argument about the facts of the matter. And, conversely, look at Galileo, whose factual truth-seeking forced him to question the Church’s moral authority.

Why does this happen? We should not be surprised – at least, no more surprised than we are that, say, scientific and mathematical explanations are connected. The truth has structural unity as well as logical consistency, and I guess that no true explanation is entirely disconnected from any other. In particular, in order to understand the moral landscape in terms of a given set of values, one needs to understand some facts as being a certain way too, and vice versa. Moreover, I think it is a general principle that morally right values are connected in this way with true factual theories, and morally wrong values with false theories.

What sort of principle is this? Though it refers to morality, at root it is epistemological. It is about the structure of true explanations, and about the circumstances under which knowledge can or cannot grow. This, in turn, makes it ultimately a physical fact – but that is another story.

Physicists, including several in this group, are fond of asking, “What if the universe had been different?” Are the fundamental constants just numbers we accept as given, but which could have been different? Or is there some deeper rationale, which we shall eventually discover, that renders them unfree to change? Is our universe the way universes have to be? Or is it one of a huge ensemble of universes? Given present company, I would not aspire to this question, fascinating as it is. Mine is its biological little brother. Is the life that we observe the way life has to be? Or could we imagine other kinds of life? Long the stock in trade of science fiction, I want to move it closer to science’s domain. Unfortunately the question is one for a chemist – which I am not. My hope is that chemists will listen, and work on it.

Life as we know it is far more uniform than superficially appears. The differences between an elephant and an amoeba are superficial. Biochemically speaking, we are all playing most of the same tricks. At this level, most of the variation in life is to be found among the bacteria. We large animals and plants have just specialised in a few of the tricks that bacterial R & D developed in the Precambrian.

But all living things, bacteria included, practise the same fundamental tricks. Using the universal DNA code, the one-dimensional sequence of DNA codons specifies the one-dimensional sequence of amino acids in proteins. This determines the proteins’ three-dimensional coiling, which specifies their enzymatic activity, and this, in turn specifies almost everything else. So, I’m not talking about whether living things on other planets will look like us, or will have television aerials sticking on their heads. It is easy to predict that heavy planets with high gravitational fields will breed elephants the size of flies (or flies built like elephants); light planets will grow elephant-sized flies with spindly legs. It is easy to predict that, where there is light, there will be eyes. This is not what I am talking about. I want the answer to a more fundamental question.

My question, which is for chemists, is this. Can you devise a fundamentally different, alternative biochemistry? Given that, as I firmly believe, life all over the universe must have evolved by the differential survival of something corresponding to genes – self-replicating codes whose nature influences their own long-term survival – do they have to be strung along polynucleotides? The genetic code itself almost certainly didn’t have to be the one we actually have – plenty of other codes would have done the job. Ours is a frozen accident which, once crystallised, could not change. But can you think of a completely different kind of molecule, not a polynucleotide at all, perhaps not even organic, which could do the coding? Does it have to be digital like the DNA/RNA code, or could some kind of analogue code be accurate and stable enough to mediate evolution? Does it even have to be a one-dimensional code? And is there any other class of molecules that could step into the shoes of proteins?

Biochemists, please stop focusing exclusively on the way life actually is. Think about how life might have been. Or how life could be on other worlds. Channel your creativity to devising a complete, alternative biochemistry, whose components are radically different from the ones we know, but are at the same time mutually compatible – participants in a wholly consistent system which your chemical calculations show could actually work.

Why should we want this? I wanted to ask the question, “Is there life on other worlds, and how similar is it to the life we know?” But there is no immediate prospect of our receiving direct answers to these questions, and I am pessimistic of our ever doing so. Life has probably arisen more than once, but on islands in space too widely scattered to make a meeting likely. Theoretical calculations may be our best hope, and are certainly our most immediate hope, of at least estimating the probabilities. There’s also the point, which hardly needs making on Edge, that to seek the unfamiliar is a good way to illuminate oneself.

Reply to Paul Davies’s response to John McCarthy

Paul Davies notes that some night-migrating birds navigate by the stars, and asks whether avian DNA contains a map of the sky. "Could a scientist in principle sequence the DNA and reconstruct the constellations?" Alas, no.

Stephen Emlen, of Cornell University, researched the matter in 1975. He placed Indigo Buntings in a circular cage in the centre of a planetarium, and measured their fluttering against different sides of the cage as an indicator of their preferred migratory direction. By manipulating the star patterns in the planetarium, blotting out patches of sky and so on, Emlen showed that the buntings did indeed use Polaris as their North, and they recognized it by the surrounding pattern of constellations.

So far so good. Now comes the interesting part. Is the pattern of stars built into the birds’ DNA, or is there some other, more general way to define the north (or south) pole of the heavens? Put it like that, and the point jumps out at you: the polar position in the sky can be defined as the centre of rotation! It is the hub that stays still, while the rest of the heavens turn. Did the birds use this as a rule for learning?

Emlen reared young buntings in the planetarium, giving them experience of different artificial ‘night skies’. Half of them, the controls, experienced a night sky that rotated about Polaris, as usual. The other half, the experimental birds, experienced a night sky in which the centre of rotation was Betelgeuse. The control birds ended up steering by Polaris, as usual. But the experimental birds, mirabile dictu, came to treat Betelgeuse as though it was due north. Clever, or what?

Try this question on any man: All you'll get for an answer is a shrugging of shoulders along with a puzzled facial expression. The one thing neither rocket scientists nor astrophysicists will ever be able to comprehend is how women think and feel. Bill Watterson's eternal six-year old Calvin (from "Calvin & Hobbes"), no smart scholar, but the epitome of the self-assured yet forever puzzled boy, summarizes his incomprehension of the opposite gender: "What is it like to be a girl? Is it like being a bug? I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature has played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it!"

In reality it is, of course, the other way around. Nature has played a cruel trick on men – rather than on women. Men's minds, for the most part, work along a single longitudinal path: A triggers B, B triggers C and so forth. They consider themselves to be smart, because they are barely able to grasp causal chains. Men's intelligence is expressed by the extent to which they can estimate or predict a sequence of steps in a chain reaction. Like chess players, some men can think one or two steps ahead, some seven or eight. Alternatives to their one-dimensional, allegedly "logical" path of thinking are beyond their imagination.

Womens minds, on the other hand, are much more complex. Women embrace several different natures in their personality. In addition to the men's straightforward "logical" way of thinking, they (according to C. G. Jung) incorporate a personification of the unconscious counter-sexual image, in other words the inner man in a woman. This archetype encompasses a number of instincts that are quite useful in supplementing a woman's emotions. In addition, women's minds embrace a third governing force, the so-called "shadow", a counter-image of their true character. The working-type woman, for instance, can identify with the feelings of a spoiled tootsie. A woman who has run expeditions in Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan all her life, can suddenly become flustered at the run of a nylon stocking. What makes women so unfathomable to men is that they can leap in a split second from one level of their personality to the other. As a consequence, that charming lady you are flirting with suddenly turns into a sharp-tongued businesswoman, only to react like a helpless college girl in the next moment. It would be asking too much of a man's mind, being merely a simplified, incomplete version of a woman's mind, to be able to comprehend this kind of complexity in the opposite gender.

Of course, one might argue that men also incorporate an anima and a shadow in their personality. So what? The effect of all three personalities is still the same: A unilateral drive towards ambition, competition and ultimately triumph. Let's face it: We men are pathetically simple minded. How simple minded? Swiss author Melina Moser knows the answer. She lists the only three things men need to be happy: Admiration, oral sex and freshly pressed orange juice.

"What will happen when the increasing speed of communication, the driving force behind cultural progress since the introduction of husbandry, suddenly becomes irrelevant?"

I am convinced that there is a predominant driving force behind cultural progress and that this driving force is speed of communications. The ancestors of modern humans lived in caves and hunted large mammals on essentially the same cultural level for over two million years. The entire history of civilization is limited only to the past 10,000 years.

In my opinion it began when, at the end of the Ice Age, sea level rose, thereby drowning estuaries and creating innumerable natural harbours. A high sea level invited people to climb aboard boats and cross the sea, thus accelerating the exchange of information between different peoples. Knowledge about new discoveries and achievements spread more rapidly and the advance of culture received its first major boost.

Since then, the acceleration of information exchange has driven cultural progress. The wheel, sailing ships, trains, planes, telephones, fax machines followed suit. Finally, the invention of the Worldwide Web caused one of the biggest hysterias in world economics. Today, we can transfer five thousand copies of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from (almost) any place on earth to (almost) any other place on earth in only one second ­ and at the maximum possible speed, the speed of light.

After ten thousand years of cultural progress mankind is now reaching the point at which any amount of information can be transferred to any place at the speed of light. The increasing speed of communication, the driving force behind cultural progress since the introduction of husbandry, suddenly becomes irrelevant.

What will happen to progress as this threshold is crossed?

This question is based on what I call, tongue in cheek, "Shermer's Last Law," that any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.

As scientist extraordinaire (most profoundly as inventor of the communications satellite) and author of an empire of science fiction books and films (most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey), Arthur C. Clarke is one of the most far-seeing visionaries of our time. Thus, his pithy quotations tug harder on our collective psyches for their inferred insights into humanity and our place in the cosmos. And none do so more than his famous three laws:

Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Clarke's Second Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

This last observation stimulated me to think more on the relationship of science and religion, particularly the impact the discovery of an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) would have on both traditions. To that end I would like to immodestly propose Shermer's Last Law (I don't believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book warns, the last shall be first and the first shall be last): "Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God".

God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an ETI who has them in relatively (to us) copious amounts? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition it "would" be an ETI! Consider two observations and one deduction:

1. Biological evolution operates at a snail's pace compared to technological evolution (the former is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success, the latter is Lamarckian and can be implemented within a single generation). 2. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty ("Voyager I", our most distant spacecraft hurtling along at over 38,000 mph, will not reach the distance of even our sun's nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system that it is "not" even headed toward, for over 75,000 years). Ergo, the probability of an ETI who is only slightly more advanced than us and also makes contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find ETI it will be as if a million-year-old "Homo erectus" were dropped into the middle of Manhattan, given a computer and cell phone and instructed to communicate with us. ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid — godlike.

Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries. It took 10,000 years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore's Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Ray Kurzweil, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that the Singularity point may be upon us as early as 2030. The Singularity (as in the center of a black hole where matter is so dense that its gravity is infinite) is the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything that we can imagine that they will appear near infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience (note the suffix!).

When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades. Extrapolate that out a hundred thousand years, or a million years (an eye blink on an evolutionary time scale and thus a realistic estimate of how far advanced ETI will be, unless we happen to be the first space-faring species, which is unlikely), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for just how godlike these creatures would seem.

In Clarke's 1953 novel Childhood's End, humanity reaches something like a Singularity (with help from ETIs) and must make the transition to a higher state of consciousness in order to grow out of childhood. One character early in the novel opines that "Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now."

Although science has not even remotely destroyed religion, Shermer's Last Law predicts that the relationship between the two will be profoundly effected by contact with ETI. To find out how we must follow Clarke's Second Law, venturing courageously past the limits of the possible and into the unknown. Ad astra!

Plato believed that human knowledge was inborn. Kant and Peirce agreed that much of knowledge had to exist prior to birth or it would be impossible to understand or learn anything. Until quite lately, psychologists were almost uniformly opposed to this notion, insisting that only process not content could be part of our native equipment. Piaget was typical (and highly influential) in asserting that only learning skills and inferential procedures such as deductive rules and schemes for induction and causal analysis were native. He also maintained that these were identical for all people with undamaged minds, and that development of such processes ended with adolescence. Content could be almost infinitely variable because these processes operate on different inputs for different people in different situations and cultures.

But recent work by psychologists provides evidence that some content is universal and native. Theories of mechanics are present by the age of three months and highly elaborated theories of mind and make their appearance before the age of four, are universal, and may also be native. Some anthropologists maintain that schemes for understanding the biological world and even some for understanding the social world are universal and native, as are some knowledge structures for representing the spirit world.

Psychologists ­ and philosophers in this case as well ­ may turn out to be wrong in assuming that all mental processes are universal, native and unalterable. Though early in the 20th century there were claims by Soviet psychologists Vygotsky and Luria that cognitive processes were historically rooted, differentiated by culture, and alterable by education, they were largely ignored. But findings have cropped up from time to time that fit these assertions. Deductive rules may be a trick learned in the process of Western-style education; rational choice procedures may be applied primarily by economists and only in very limited domains by lay people; statistical rules (Piaget's "probability schema") may be used only to a very slight extent by non-Western peoples.

Authors of this year's questions have asked how radical the differences among universes, mathematical systems, and kinds of life might be. How radical could the differences among humans be in basic knowledge structures and inferential procedures? What has to be shared or even inborn? What can be allowed to vary?

There are, it seems to me, just two fundamental scientific questions that, for very different reasons, we may have no possibility of answering with any certainty.

One question is so fundamental that it is arguably not a scientific question at all: It's the big how and why question of existence itself. Although there are many technical questions still to be answered, as a mathematician, I find myself broadly content with science's explanation of how the physical universe — including time itself — sprang into being: the symmetry breaking, primordial fireball we call the Big Bang, followed by the subsequent evolution into the universe we see today. But that is simply an explanation of the mechanics of the universe of our experience and perception. It leaves us with a lingering question of how, and perhaps why, the framework arose in which the Big Bang took place in the first place — be that framework one in which our universe is the only one there is and has ever been, or one that cycles in "universe time" (whatever that is), or maybe some kind of multiple universe scenario.

I accept that this is not really a scientific question. Science only addresses the how of our own universe, starting just after the Big Bang. But my curiosity, both as a scientist and more generally just as a thinking person, cannot help but dwell from time to time on the biggest question of all — the question that for those having a deep religious faith seems to find an answer in the phrase "God made it that way." (An answer that I find even more incomprehensible in a world where millions of human beings believe that that same God authorizes his chosen emissaries to fly jet airliners full of humans into buildings full of other humans.)

My second fundamental question is clearly a genuine scientific matter. In fact, it is a technical question about evolution by natural selection. Exactly how and why did a species (namely, us) develop that has the capacity to think abstractly, that possesses language, and that can reflect on its own existence? Like the big existence issue, this is a question that has enormous significance for us, as humans. And that makes it the more frustrating that we may find ourselves unable ever to answer it with any certainty.

In my recent book The Math Gene, I summarized arguments to show that the possession of language (i.e., a symbolic communication system with a recursive grammatical structure allowing for the production and comprehension of meaningful utterances of unlimited length) and the ability for "offline" thinking (reasoning about the world in the absence of direct input from the environment and without the automatic generation of a physical response) are two sides of the same coin. Implicit in that argument is that this ability also brings with it the capacity for self-reflective, conscious thought. (I also argued that such a mental capacity also yields the potential for mathematical thought.) Thus, we are talking here about the capacity that makes us human, and in so doing makes us very different from any other species on Earth.

The best evidence we have from anthropology is that our ancestors acquired this capacity some time between 75,000 and 200,000 years ago. (The evidence is in the form of manufactured artifacts that early humans left behind, which indicate such a level of abstract thinking and communication.) But how — and in terms of natural selection, why — did our ancestors acquire this capacity? All we know for sure is that it came at the end of a three-and-a-half-million year period in which the average brain size of our ancestors grew to roughly its present level, approximately nine times larger than is normal for a mammal of our body size and about twice that of a present-day ape.

What makes this question particularly hard is that, at least in terms of functionality (as opposed to brain structure), the acquisition of syntactic structure (i.e., the structure that enables us to create complex sentences or to reason abstractly about the world) is an all-or-nothing event. As linguists have pointed out, you cannot have "half a grammar". True, in theory you can have grammars without, say, passive constructions, but there is no chain of gradually more complex grammars that starts with protolanguage — simple subject-predication utterances — and leads continuously to the grammatical structure that is common to all human languages. The chain has to start with a sudden jump. Although the acquisition of language was a major functional change in brain capacity, there is no reason why that jump was not the result of a tiny structural change in the brain. But what propelled the brain to reach a stage where such a change could occur? And what exactly was that small structural change? This would surely be a minor technical question about one detail, among thousands, of evolutionary history, were it not for the fact that it was this single change that made us human — that made it possible for us to ask these how and why questions, and to care about the answers.

One oft-repeated suggestion for the natural selection advantage that language provides is that it enabled the communication of more complex thoughts and ideas than was previously possible. But that suggestion falls down immediately when you realize that such communication can only arise when the brain that is doing the communicating is able to form those complex thoughts and ideas in the first place, and that capacity itself requires a brain having grammatical structure.

It seems likely that the two sides of this particular coin, thinking complex thoughts and communicating them, arose at the same time, and indeed it could have taken both aspects together to spur the development that led to their acquisition. But we are still left with the tantalizing question that the obvious natural selection advantages this capacity provides only came into play after the capacity was in place. Just what led to and prompted that jump remains a mystery.

There has been, as you might imagine, no shortage of attempts to provide an explanation, but so far I haven't seen one that I find convincing, or even close to convincing. (I mention some in The Math Gene, and give pointers to further reading on the matter.) And even if someone produces a compelling explanation, it seems we will never know for sure. When our early ancestors died, their brains rapidly rotted away, leaving nothing but the skulls that contained them. And even if, by some fluke, we found an intact brain from some early ancestor, buried deep in the ice of a glacier somewhere, how could that help us? Dissecting an object as complex as the human brain tells us virtually nothing about what that brain did — how it thought and what it thought about.

Our higher brain functions could just have been an accident. Of course, all evolutionary changes are accidents. What I mean here is that it may be purely accidental that the structural change in the brain that gave us language and abstract, symbolic thought did in fact have that effect. It might just be, as some have suggested, that the brain grew in complexity as a device for cooling the blood, and that language and symbolic thought are mere accidental by-products of the body's need to maintain a certain temperature range. (Certainly, the brain is an extremely efficient cooling device, as illustrated by the fact that putting on a hat is an extremely efficient way of staying warm when we go skiing.) Personally, I don't buy the cooling mechanism explanation. But unless and until someone comes up with something more convincing, I see no way we can rule it out.

For all our huge success in telling the story of how life began and evolved to its present myriad of forms, it seems likely that we may never know for certain exactly what it was that gave us the one thing we value above all else, and the thing that makes us human: our minds. If there is one question I would like to answer above all others, it is this one.

Precollegiate education has been remarkably consistent over the decades: literacy in the primary years, initial mastery of a few major subject areas (math, science, history, language, perhaps in the arts) in middle and secondary school. We could take the position that we know how to do this and should just stick to our guns. I don't agree.

Because of globalization, the capacity to think across disciplines, to synthesize wide ranges of information efficiently and accurately, to deal with individuals and institutions with which one has no personal familiarity, to adjust to the continuing biological and technological revolutions, are at a far greater premium. And because of the events of September 11, we need to think much more deeply about the nature of democratic institutions and the threats to them, the role and limits of tolerance and civil liberties, the fate of scarce resources, profound gaps across religions and cultures, just to name a few.

The time has come where we need to rethink what we teach, how we teach, what young people learn on their own, how they interact, how they relate to mass culture, etc. The question we must then ask is: Do we have to continue to be reactive or can we plan proactively the education that is needed for our progeny in this new world?

The world is caught up in a paroxysm of change. Key words: globalism, multinational corporations, ethical influences in business, explosive growth of science-based technology, fundamentalism, religion and science, junk science, alternative medicines, rich vs. poor gap, who supports research, where is it done, how is it used, advances in cognition science, global warming, the disconnect between high school and college....these and other influences are undergoing drastic changes and all will have some impact on science, mathematics and technology and therefore on how our schools must change to produce graduates who can function in the 21st century...function and assume positions of leadership. Is it conceivable that the standard curriculum in science and math, crafted in 1893, will still be maintained in the 26,000 high schools of this great nation?

This is a question that obsesses me in my daily activities. I have been agonizing over it along with a few colleagues around Fermilab, University of California, and the students, staff and trustees of the Illinois Math Science Academy (IMSI), a three year public residential high school for gifted students, I was involved in founding some 16 years ago.

It differs in countless ways, most of them poorly understood. It generally deals with individuals rather than analyses or averages, with motives and reasons rather than movements and causes. It has a point of view rather than a "view" from nowhere. As the writer's maxim says, it shows rather than tells, contains dialogue rather than only declarative sentences, relies on context rather than raw data alone, is open-ended and metaphorical rather than determinate and literal, is tied to a particular time rather than being timeless, and deals with emotions rather than impersonal facts. Furthermore, narrative logic must deal with the notion of "common knowledge," whereby two or more people know something, know that the others know it, know that the others know that others know, and so on. In short, narrative logic is much harder than mathematical logic.

In everyday "story logic," how "we," the story-tellers, characterize an event or person is crucial. If a man touches his hand to his eyebrow, for example, we may see this as an indication he has a headache. We may also see the gesture as a signal from a baseball coach to the batter. Then again, we may infer that the man is trying to hide his anxiety by appearing nonchalant, that it is simply a habit of his, that he is worried about getting dust in his eye, or indefinitely many other things depending on indefinitely many perspectives we might have and on the indefinitely many human contexts in which we might find ourselves. A similar open-endedness characterizes the use of probability and statistics in surveys and studies.

Furthermore, unlike mathematical logic, story logic does not allow for substitutions. In mathematical contexts, for example, the number 3 can always be substituted for the square root of 9 or the largest whole number smaller than the constant without affecting the truth of the statement in which it appears. By contrast, although Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly, and even though Superman equals Clark Kent, the substitution of one for the other can't be made. Oedipus is attracted to the woman Jocasta, not to the extensionally equivalent person who is his mother. In the impersonal realm of mathematics, one's ignorance or one's attitude toward some entity does not affect the validity of a proof involving it or the allowability of substituting equals for equals.

Recent events around the world remind us of historical phenomena observed since the dawn of civilizations: wars, genocides, oppression, conquests, occupations, and, of course, killings in the name of some God. Although the underlying principles are the same, modern killings are more sophisticated, spectacular, and effective than those in the past. In a matter of hours, you can now hijack a plane and crush it against an office building killing thousands, or you can (as it was done more than 50 years ago) drop an atomic bomb over a city killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. You can see all that on TV.

Studying non-human animals, contemporary biology, evolutionary theory, and modern ethology have gathered enough knowledge to respond to questions regarding the nature of aggression, social power, alliance formation, hierarchical domination, and attack-defense behavior. Psychology, anthropology and cognitive science have added important pieces extending this knowledge into human animals. From these studies contemporary science has got some deep understanding about what peace is about. In a nutshell, the moral is that there is no absolute, ideal or ultimate peace in the animal kingdom. Peace turns out to be a fragile local phenomenon that depends on circumstances, population density, biological needs, availability of resources, and so on. If you value peace, the best you can do is to provide conditions for peace, not to "install" peace itself.

So, if we have good scientific knowledge about the nature of peace, how come we don't have peace on earth? Well, because we don't want to accept that we are animals. We prefer to continue believing that we are the protégées of our own created Gods, and that we are, in a transcendental sense, different from a chimpanzee. Peace for humans is taken to be something profound, spiritual and pure, not a bio-social emerging phenomenon. Our created Gods provide the moral values that define what the absolute and ultimate peace is supposed to be, and who is supposed to impose it. There is no surprise then if we see intransigent world and religious leaders calling for holy wars, fighting the Evil in the name of the Good, and justifying in the name of peace, the bombing of civilians, the construction of missile shields, or the occupation of foreign territories.

If we really value peace (but I am not sure this is what some world powers really want!), what we need is to provide sustainable conditions for peace. And for this, it would be much easier to know how to do it, if we assume once for all, that we are indeed animals.

We know that genes play an important role in the shaping of our personality and intellects. Identical twins separated at birth (who share all their genes but not their environments) and tested as adults are strikingly similar-though far from identical-in their intellects and personalities. Identical twins reared together (who share all their genes and most of their environments) are much more similar than fraternal twins reared together (who share half their genes and most of their environments). Biological siblings (who share half their genes and most of their environments) are much more similar than adopted siblings (who share none of their genes and most of their environments).

Many people are so locked into the theory that the mind is a Blank Slate that when they hear these findings they say, "So you're saying it's all in the genes!" If genes have any effect at all, it must be total. But the data show that genes account for about only about half of the variance in personality and intelligence (25% to 75%, depending on how things are measured). That leaves around half the variance to be explained by something that is not genetic.

The next reaction is, "That means the other half of the variation must come from how we were brought up by our parents." Wrong again. Consider these findings. Identical twins separated at birth are not only similar; they are "no less" similar than identical twins reared together. The same is true of non-twin siblings — they are no more similar when reared together than when reared apart. Identical twins reared together — who share all their genes and most of their family environments-are only about 50% similar, not 100%. And adopted siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. All this means that growing up in the same home — with the same parents, books, TVs, guns, and so on — does not make children similar.

So the variation in personality and intelligence breaks down roughly as follows: genes 50%, families 0%, something else 50%. As with Bob Dylan's Mister Jones, something is happening here but we don't know what it is.

Perhaps it is chance. While in the womb, the growth cone of an axon zigged rather than zagged, and the brain gels into a slightly different configuration. If so, it would have many implications that have not figured into our scientific or everyday way of thinking. One can imagine a developmental process in which millions of small chance events cancel one another out, leaving no difference in the end product. One can imagine a different process in which a chance event could derail development entirely, making a freak or monster. Neither of these happens. The development of organisms must use complex feedback loops rather than blueprints. Random events can divert the trajectory of growth, but the trajectories are confined within an envelope of functioning designs for the species defined by natural selection.

Also, what we are accustomed to thinking of as "the environment" — namely the proportion of variance that is not genetic — may have nothing to do with the environment. If the nongenetic variance is a product of chance events in brain assembly, yet another chunk of our personalities and intellects would be "biologically determined" (though not genetic) and beyond the scope of the best laid plans of parents and society.

Many human skills enable an individual to do something with less physiological effort. If you are good at skiing (and I am not) it takes less energy to climb that mountain. One can even argue forcefully that a mental "understanding" of a phenomenon allows one to perceive it with less increase in brain metabolism.
But not all skills are directed at a reduction of the expenditure. Many creative activities involve a huge effort to explore new issues or phenomena. The better skier goes beyond the first mountain. New worlds and ideas are explored. Why do we bother — or why do some of us bother?

One could argue that we explore new phenomena to produce skilful insights that will in the future allow us to visit the same phenomena again with less effort. But is that really enough? Can such a functional explanation of creativity as an initial effort devoted to enable a future reduction of the effort really capture the reasons for people to involve themselves in lifelong efforts to understand the world of ants or the intricacy of ski dope?

It seems that president John F. Kennedy captured an essential element in creative efforts when he, in his famous speech at Rice University in 1962, argued for the decision to create the Apollo program: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."

Indeed, the most important outcome of Apollo — offering earthlings an outside view of their planet, visualizing the vulnerability of the Earth and its biosphere — was an unintended result of doing a major effort. It did pay off to do something hard. Somehow we know that doing something hard, rather than something easy, is fruitful. But we also know that doing it the hardest way possible (like when I ski) is not a very efficient way of getting anywhere.

We want to be efficient, but also to do difficult things. Why? In a sense this is a rephrasing of Brian Eno's question in Edge 11: "Why Culture"? Many different approaches can be taken involving different disciplines such as economy, anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology etc.

An idea currently explored in both economy and evolutionary biology could be relevant: Costly signals. They provide the answer to the question: How does one advertise one's own hidden qualities (in the genes or in the bank) in a trustworthy way? By giving a signal that is very costly to produce. One has to have a strong bank account, a very good physiology (and hence good genes) or a strong national R&D programme to do costly things. The more difficult, the better the advertising.

Perhaps we bother because we want to show that we are strong and worthy of mating? Culture is all about doing something that is so difficult that only a healthy individual or society could do it.

If so, it's not at all about reducing the effort, it's all about expanding the effort.

For the past four centuries, the attempt to answer this question has been the main driving force of world history ­ not only the history of ideas, but also the history of politics and collective violence. This is true for two reasons:

1. It is impossible for people to live without constructing some cognitive structure (which philosophers call practical reason) that asks and answers questions concerning how to live and what to do ­ traditionally, by formulating them in moral or ethical terms as how we should live and what we ought to do.

2. When humanity made the transition, at the time of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, to a new and higher stage of its collective cognitive development by progressing from theology and philosophy to science, it became more and more difficult for people to see how it could be possible to answer the old pre scientific theological and philosophical questions, "what is good and what is evil?" Those questions came to be seen as unanswerable and hence meaningless because what the scientific revolution showed, above all, was that what we call "knowledge" (scientia) is possible when, and only when, it can be framed in the form of hypotheses that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by means of experience, i.e., empirical data and observations.

That entailed, for example, the conclusion that metaphysical knowledge (knowledge of Absolute Reality, or God, as It, He or She exists independently of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus) is unattainable. (Nietzsche called this the "death of God.") But that was not an insuperable problem, because metaphysics was immediately replaced by physics, which had far greater cognitive power to predict, explain and control the phenomena being cognized anyway.

What has been an insuperable problem, up to now, has been the unavailability of any cognitively adequate replacement for ethics. Moral knowledge is unattainable because there is, in principle and by definition, no conceivable moral hypothesis that could possibly be proved or disproved by means of any conceivable type of empirical data, test or experiment. That is true, among other reasons, because moral statements do not take the form of empirically testable hypotheses, or hypothetical imperatives ("If you want X, then you can get it by doing Y" -­ but with no guidance as to whether you should want X in the first place). Moral statements take the form of value judgments and categorical imperatives (i.e., commandments or orders as to what you should do or want). Commandments can never be true or false, so they cannot communicate knowledge. And value judgments are incapable of communicating knowledge about the external world; the only thing they can express are subjective wishes, tastes and preferences which are, from a logical and epistemological point of view, completely non-rational and arbitrary, matters of whim, about which we can only say De gustibus non disputandum est.

Of course, it has always been known that beauty exists in the eye of the beholder. What had not been seen so clearly, until the scientific revolution, was that the same was true of good and evil. The first modern personality, Hamlet, expressed this clearly in 1601 when he said "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." I.e., good and evil are words for subjective preferences, sentiments of approval or disapproval, that exist only in the mind of the beholder. They do not exist as objective realities whose validity can be known or tested, proved or disproved. And Hamlet's fate shows how confused, paralyzed, violent and self-destructive people can become when they have recognized that it is impossible to know what one "should" do, but have not yet discovered how to replace that question with one that is answerable.

Thus, it is not only God (and the Devil) that are dead; more importantly, so are Good and Evil, the abstract philosophical concepts of which the former are the concrete mythological and theological incarnations. As Ivan Karamazov put it (speaking for those for whom God is the only credible and legitimate source of moral authority), "without God anything is possible, everything is permitted." But even those who, following Kant or Rawls, would like to place their faith in pure (a priori) reason, and would trust it to take the place of God as the source of moral knowledge, are doomed to disappointment and ignorance; for even Kant made it clear that moral knowledge was unattainable. As he put it, "I must destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith (Glaube, also translatable as "belief")." That is, even the most dedicated champion of pure (a priori) practical reason as the source of moral knowledge had to admit that moral knowledge is unattainable; all he could put in its place was faith. And by the time he wrote those words, the Age of Faith had long since been dead and buried. Indeed, the whole history of modern science was one long demonstration that knowledge was attainable when, and only when, one replaced faith with its opposite, the attitude of universal doubt, and refused to believe any proposition that had not been tested against empirical evidence.

One inescapable consequence that followed from all this was the loss of credibility of the traditional sources of moral authority (God and pure reason). Why did that create such a crisis that most of human history since the 17th century has been a series of attempts to come to terms with it, both in theory and in practice? Because human nature abhors a cognitive vacuum, especially in the sphere of practical reason. For without some way of answering the questions that practical reason asks, concerning how to live and what to do, humans are totally disoriented and without direction, a condition that is intolerable and panic-inducing. Once they have discovered the cognitive inadequacies of the moral way of formulating those questions and answers, as they have to an increasing extent since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and have not yet discovered how to progress to a more cognitively adequate form of practical reason, many people will regress to a more intellectually primitive and politically reactionary set of questions and answers. In the 20th century these took the form of political totalitarianism, which led to genocide; more recently, they have taken the form of religious fundamentalism, which has increasingly led to apocalyptic terrorism. Given the existence of weapons of mass destruction, it hardly needs to be stressed how much both of these ideologies potentially threaten the survival of our species.

These political/ideological movements have been widely, and correctly, interpreted as rebellions or reactions against modernity (whether modernity is conceived of as Western civilization, Jewish science, modern technology, religious unbelief, freedom to express any opinion, or whatever), though usually without specifying what it is about modernity that threatens our very existence and survival. The deepest threat, I would maintain, is cognitive chaos in the realm of practical reason, and thus nihilism in the realm of morality, anomie in the realm of law, and anarchy in the realm of politics. The paradox is that the political movements that have been most widely interpreted as nihilistic and "evil" ­- Nazi, Stalinist and theocratic totalitarianism and their sequelae, genocide and terrorism ­ in fact originated as desperate (and misguided) attempts to ward off nihilism and what their adherents consider "evil." To them, the greatest evil is modernity, on in other words, the modern scientific mentality, which replaces certainty with doubt, dogmatism with skepticism, authority with evidence, faith with agnosticism, coercion with persuasion, violence with words and ideas, and hierarchy with democracy and equality of opportunity ­ all of which fills them with overwhelming dread and terror, amounting to a kind of existential or moral panic.

In fact, to the totalitarian/fundamentalist mind, modernity not only represents absolute evil; it represents something even worse than that, namely, the total absence and delegitimation of any standards of good and evil whatsoever ­ the total death of good and evil, a state of complete anomie and nihilism. For without knowing what is good and evil, how can one know what to do? And without knowing what to do, how can one live (not only biologically, but even mentally)? How can one maintain any mental, emotional, social, cultural or political coherence and order? As Kenneth Tynan remarked, "Hell is not the place of evil; rather, Hell is the absence of any standards at all." That condition is so intolerable to humans that many will regress to even the most irrational and destructive ideology if they cannot find some more epistemologically powerful cognitive structure with which to replace the old moral way of thinking, once its cognitive inadequacy has been so deeply perceived that its credibility has been irreversibly destroyed.

Cognitive growth occurs by finding better and better answers to existing questions. Cognitive development occurs only when one begins to ask a new and different set of questions. We do this only when we notice that our current questions are meaningless because they are unanswerable, so that they need to be replaced with a different set of questions that can be answered. By this point, in the 21st century, we now realize that it is impossible to answer the moral (and legal and political) questions, "How should we live and what ought we to do?" The only questions that are meaningful, in that they can lead to answers that possess cognitive content or knowledge, are the questions "How can we live? i.e., what biological, psychological and social forces, processes and behavior patterns promote, protect and preserve life, and which ones cause death?" For that question can be answered, by means of empirical investigation as to the causes and prevention of the extinction of species (including our own, as by nuclear holocaust or unrestrained devastation of our natural environment), the extermination of social groups (through epidemics of collective violence, such as war, genocide, poverty, famine, etc.), and the deaths of individuals (by means of homicide, suicide, obesity, alcoholism, etc.). In other words, the only possible replacement for ethics or morality that is progressive rather than regressive is the human sciences ­ human biology, psychology and psychiatry, and the social sciences.

Unfortunately, the modern human sciences, unlike the natural sciences, had not yet been invented when the scientific revolution of the 17th century first showed that moral knowledge was unattainable. And even today, the ability of the human sciences to predict, explain and control the objects of their scrutiny (human behavior) is extremely limited, whether compared with that which the natural sciences possess with respect to their objects of study, or with the degree of cognitive power that the human sciences will need to attain if we are to gain the ability to avert the headlong rush to species-wide self-destruction that we currently seem to be embarked upon. In other words, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's remark about democracy, the human sciences are the worst (the least cognitively adequate) of all possible forms of practical reason ­ except for all the others (such as moralism, fundamentalism and totalitarianism)! What that implies is that nothing is more important for the continued survival of the human species than a stupendously increased effort to make progress in the further development of the human sciences, so as to increase our understanding of the causes of the whole range of our own behaviors, from life-threatening (violent) to life-enhancing.

Is it just a matter of IQ? (Though I thought intellectuals no longer believed in IQ...) But empirically it can't be an IQ issue, because so many of history's greatest minds based their lives on religion — from Michaelangelo or Bach to Spinoza or Dante or Kant. Do modern intellectuals actually believe that all such people are naively deluded? Or could they be missing something themselves?

Question: Since the 1930s, we have had to live with Godel's theorem — the apparently unshaken proof by the logician Kurt Godel that there can be no system of mathematical logic that is at once consistent (or free from contradictions) and complete (in the sense of being comprehensive). The question is whether there is, or whether we should expect, such a fracture in the logical basis on which people now look for a description of the nexus between particle physics and cosmology.

Why: The chief interest of Godel's theorem is that it is a negative answer to one of the questions in David Hilbert's celebrated list of tasks for the twentieth century, put forward at the International Mathematics Congress in Paris in 1900. Mathematicians in the succeeding century seem not to have been unduly incommoded by Godel. But if there were a comparable theorem in fundamental physics, we should have more serious difficulties. Perhaps the circumstance that string theory is getting nowhere (not fast, but slowly) should be taken as a premonition that something is amiss. The search for a Theory of Everything (latterly gone off the boil) may be logically the wild goose chase it most often seems. If science had to abandon the principle that to every event, there is a cause (or causes) , the cat would really be among the pigeons.

Moral: Godel's theorem needs seriously to be re-visited, so that the rest of us can properly appreciate what it means.

Much ado has been made lately over the problems of the PC "desktop metaphor," the system of folders and icons included in Macintosh and Windows PCs. Critics of the desktop rightly point out that today's PC users encounter much more information than in the 1980s, when the desktop was first introduced. While I understand these criticisms, I question whether the desktop is really dead ‹ in other words, whether the solution really lies in building a better desktop. Instead, I think that the real issue is the increased information, not the interface between it and the user.

Some technologists are ready to discard the old desktop. Last month MIT's Technology Review ran a piece on new software attempting to bypass the desktop metaphor. None of the tools are very convincing. Scopeware, a software package from Mirror Worlds Technologies (founded by David Gelernter, an Edge contributor), essentially removes all file hierarchy by showing files sorted by creation date. While the tool has some nice search features, it's unclear how removing all file hierarchy is an improvement over today's desktop. Other technologies in the article include a two-dimensional graphical "map" of the file system and a 3-D navigable space. These programs try to solve the problem of a cluttered desktop by presenting a new metaphor that could become just as cluttered.

To be sure, there are advances to be made in the tools. Using Microsoft Windows, even briefly, reveals so many interface flaws that it makes me cringe. But fixing these myriad flaws will not address the central issue, which is the tsunami of information arriving into users' PCs. It is the user, not the tool, that should be the focus.

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed several Americans to inquire about their personal strategies for dealing with their e-mail. Receiving 50 to 150 incoming messages per day, these PC users described the methods they use to stay on top of their information and remain effective in their jobs.

What's interesting about this article is that the Journal recognized e-mail use as a personal activity. Many other business activities, like using approved software or submitting timesheets, may be closely regulated by the IT department ‹ but not e-mail. Each user in the article has become conscious of his or her information flow and has created a system to manage it, using the software (albeit flawed) at his or her disposal. The story is about personal needs first, tools second. The industry's response to this problem should be the same. If we could just teach more users to use their tools better, we'd be in far better shape than if we simply churned out yet more complex software.

I would be happy to be proven wrong. Gelernter's Scopeware, for example, could turn out to be a revolutionary advance in curing information anxiety. My guess, however, is that even the best tools will fall short of a cure. We may need a combined strategy of better tools and greater education of users about the nature of a world awash in information. To be effective in coming years, users must assume greater responsibility for their own information management.

Of course, there are problems with that proposition. For one, new desktop metaphors, like the 3-D software, is sexy and makes for interesting press clips. Educating users is decidedly dull. What's worse, there is no easy business plan to educate users en masse in more efficient ways to organize their information. Making a tool that promises to help is so much more profitable. But tools alone won't save us. If all we can do for users is give them a newer, flashier, more distracting interface, then the desktop may indeed be dead forever.

I work on the question of evolution, not as it exists in Nature, but as a formal system which enables open-ended learning. Can we understand the process in enough detail to simulate the progress of biological complexity in pure software or electronics? A phenomena has appeared in many of my laboratory's experiments in learning across many different domains like game playing and robots. We have dubbed it a "Mediocre Stable State." It is an unexpected systematic equilibrium, where a collection of sub-optimal agents act together to prevent further progress. In dynamical systems, the MSS hides within cycles of forgetting that which has been already been learned.

When a MSS arises, instead of achieving creativity driven by merit based competition, progress is subverted through unspoken collusion. This occurs even in systems where agents cannot "think" but are selected by the invisible hand of a market. We know what collusion is: the two gas stations on opposite street corners fix their prices to divide the market. Hawks on both sides of a conflict work together to undermine progress towards peace. The union intimidates the pace-setter, lest he raise the work standards for everyone else. The telephone company undercapitalizes its own lucrative deployment of broadband, which might replace toll collection. Etc.

As a scientist with many interests in High Technology, of course I know there is progress. I am witness to new discoveries, new technologies, and the march of Moore's law. Clearly, the airplane, long distance communication, and the computer are revolutionarily progressive in amplifying human commerce, communication and even conflict. But these scientific and technological advances stand in stark contrast to the utter depressing lack of progress in human affairs.

Despite the generation of material wealth, health breakthroughs, and birth control methods which could end want and war, human social affairs are organized almost exactly the way they were 500 years ago. Human colonies seem — like ant colonies and dog packs — fixed by our genetic heritage, despite individual cognitive abilities. In fact, it is difficult to distinguish anymore between Dictatorships, Authoritarian Regimes, Monarchies, Theocracies, and Kleptocracies, or even one-party (or two party oscillatory) democracies. When labels are removed, it looks as if authority and power are still distributed in hierarchical oligarchies, arranged regionally. Stability of the oligarchic network is maintained by complex feedback loops involving wealth, loyalty, patronage, and control of the news.

Of course, I'm not against stability itself! But when patronage and loyalty (the collusion of the political system) are rewarded more than competitive merit and excellence, progress is subverted.

The 90's really felt like progress to me, especially with visible movement towards peace in certain regions of the world and an unparalleled creative burst in our industry. But now its like we've just been memory bombed back to the 1950's. The government is printing money and giving it to favored industries. We are fighting an invisible dehumanized enemy. War is reported as good for the economy. Loyalty to the fatherland must be demonstrated. One Phone Company to rule us all. An expensive arms race in space. And law breaking secret agents are the coolest characters on TV.

Havent we been here before? Haven't we learned anything?

Our one fixed resource is time — human attention. As we become increasingly networked in the technological sense, we also become more networked in the social sense.

As our social networks scale up, we move more and more of our interactions to the technological sphere. We can have many more telephone interactions than we can have hand-written letter interactions. When we move from telephone to e mail, the number of interactions between people goes up even more dramatically.

Then we pair our e-mail interactions with a personal Web site, and we start moving our personalities into the technology net, as a way of automating and scaling up the number of relationships even further.

We end up with personal CRM systems to handle our increased interaction load, and then add interfaces from our technology net to our human forms. These interfaces will develop from current-day Palm Pilots and Blackberry's to heads-up display style interfaces in glasses and eventually retinal and neuronal interfaces.

"Hi Jerry, Ahh.., we met back in 1989, May 14th at 7pm, and since then we've exchanged 187 e-mails and 39 phone calls. I hope your cousin's daughter Gina had a wonderful graduation yesterday."

The whole range of interactions becomes organized. Introductions from one person to another, and rating systems become automated.

Currently many people run into barriers as their personal networks approach the range of thousands of people. Soon they will move to the tens of thousands, to the millions and beyond.

With these trends, the friction costs of personal introductions go down, and consequently the value of quality measurement and gatekeeping go up dramatically. As the depth of knowledge in a relationship increases, the threshold point at which you 'really know someone' increases also. It's an arms race of intimacy.

Perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic collection of molecules that comprise my body and brain.

But there’s a problem. The specific set of particles that comprise my body and brain are completely different from the atoms and molecules than comprised me only a short while (on the order of weeks) ago. We know that most of our cells are turned over in a matter of weeks. Even those that persist longer (e.g., neurons) nonetheless change their component molecules in a matter of weeks.

So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago. All that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slowly and in a continuum from my past self. From this perspective I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules (of water) change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years.

So, perhaps we should say I am a pattern of matter and energy that persists in time.

But there is a problem here as well. We will ultimately be able to scan and copy this pattern in a at least sufficient detail to replicate my body and brain to a sufficiently high degree of accuracy such that the copy is indistinguishable from the original (i.e., the copy could pass a “Ray Kurzweil” Turing test). I won’t repeat all the arguments for this here, but I describe this scenario in a number of documents including the essay "The Law of Accelerating Returns."

The copy, therefore, will share my pattern. One might counter that we may not get every detail correct. But if that is true, then such an attempt would not constitute a proper copy. As time goes on, our ability to create a neural and body copy will increase in resolution and accuracy at the same exponential pace that pertains to all information-based technologies. We ultimately will be able to capture and recreate my pattern of salient neural and physical details to any desired degree of accuracy.

Although the copy shares my pattern, it would be hard to say that the copy is me because I would (or could) still be here. You could even scan and copy me while I was sleeping. If you come to me in the morning and say, “Good news, Ray, we’ve successfully reinstantiated you into a more durable substrate, so we won’t be needing your old body and brain anymore,” I may beg to differ.

If you do the thought experiment, it’s clear that the copy may look and act just like me, but it’s nonetheless not me because I may not even know that he was created. Although he would have all my memories and recall having been me, from the point in time of his creation, Ray 2 would have his own unique experiences and his reality would begin to diverge from mine.

Now let’s pursue this train of thought a bit further and you will see where the dilemma comes in. If we copy me, and then destroy the original, then that’s the end of me because as we concluded above the copy is not me. Since the copy will do a convincing job of impersonating me, no one may know the difference, but it’s nonetheless the end of me. However, this scenario is entirely equivalent to one in which I am replaced gradually. In the case of gradual replacement, there is no simultaneous old me and new me, but at the end of the gradual replacement process, you have the equivalent of the new me, and no old me. So gradual replacement also means the end of me.

However, as I pointed out at the beginning of this question, it is the case that I am in fact being continually replaced. And, by the way, it’s not so gradual, but a rather rapid process. As we concluded, all that persists is my pattern. But the thought experiment above shows that gradual replacement means the end of me even if my pattern is preserved. So am I constantly being replaced by someone else who just seems a like lot me a few moments earlier?

So, again, who am I? It’s the ultimate ontological question. We often refer to this question as the issue of consciousness. I have consciously (no pun intended) phrased the issue entirely in the first person because that is the nature of the issue. It is not a third person question. So my question is not “Who is John Brockman?” although John may ask this question himself.

When people speak of consciousness, they often slip into issues of behavioral and neurological correlates of consciousness (e.g., whether or not an entity can be self-reflective), but these are third person (i.e., objective) issues, and do not represent what David Chalmers calls the “hard question” of consciousness.

The question of whether or not an entity is conscious is only apparent to himself. The difference between neurological correlates of consciousness (e.g., intelligent behavior) and the ontological reality of consciousness is the difference between objective (i.e., third person) and subjective (i.e., first person) reality. For this reason, we are unable to propose an objective consciousness detector that does not have philosophical assumptions built into it.

I do say that we (humans) will come to accept that nonbiological entities are conscious because ultimately they will have all the subtle cues that humans currently possess that we associate with emotional and other subjective experiences. But that’s a political and psychological prediction, not an observation that we will be able to scientifically verify. We do assume that other humans are conscious, but this is an assumption, and not something we can objectively demonstrate.

I will acknowledge that John Brockman did seem conscious to me when he interviewed me, but I should not be too quick to accept this impression. Perhaps I am really living in a simulation, and John was part of the simulation. Or, perhaps it’s only my memories that exist, and the actual experience never took place. Or maybe I am only now experiencing the sensation of recalling apparent memories of having met John, but neither the experience nor the memories really exist. Well, you see the problem.

When we speak about our experiences, we use terms like emotion, perception, thought, action, motivation, attention, free will. And these concepts have been the starting point for research and speculation about the brain. But now the evidence is starting to mount that our categories don't fit what's really going on, as far as we can measure and describe. It may turn out that the differences between a thought and an emotion, a perception and an action, a mood and a belief, are part of our tradition of "folk psychology" — the things we tell ourselves to explain the world in ordinary conversation.

For hundreds of years the pattern in science has been to overturn folk concepts, and it seems to me the brain may be the next field for such a conceptual revolution. It may be that in a hundred years people will speak of free will, or the unconscious, or emotion, in the way that we now speak of "sunrise" or "forever" — words that serve for day-to-day talk, but don't map reality. We know the sun doesn't rise because it is the earth that moves and we know that humanity and its planet and the universe itself won't last forever. I see signs that concepts of the mind are due for the same sort of revision. And so that's the question I keep returning to.

Humans are, to our knowledge, the only species who can inquire into the nature of nature. So it is not just narcissism that drives our efforts to understand what makes humans different from other animals. Often we are drawn to the great achievements of Homo sapiens in the arts, science, mathematics, and technology, because we view these achievements and the minds that created them as the paragon of what makes us special. The assumption is that these minds got an extra dose of the best of what makes humans human. But several lines of evidence are now coming together to suggest something a bit different and, for many people, more than a bit disturbing.

It is now well known that great achievers are disproportionately likely to suffer from mental illnesses. Severe mental illnesses, particularly bipolar disorder, are much more common among the greatest novelists, poets, painters, and musicians, than among your everyday H. sapiens, especially in recent centuries as the great accomplishments have become more abstract, that is, less normal. A Freudian might explain this association by suppressed social environment that generated both the creativity and their illness. To geneticists, consideration of familial associations suggests a genetic causes. What flows from these perspectives is the dogma that has dominated most of the past century: mental illness and mental creativity result primarily from an interaction between stressful environments and unusual human alleles.

A careful consideration of the evidence and application of natural selection, however, implicate another cause: infectious agents. People with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for example, are more likely to be born in late winter or spring, when born in temperate latitudes. This pattern is a smoking gun for prenatal or perinatal infectious causation, which can also explain the known familial associations as well as or better than human genetics. And human genetics does not offer sensible explanations of other aspects of these disease, such as the season-of-birth associations, the urban/rural associations or the high fitness costs associated with the diseases. People with severe mental illnesses commit suicide at a rate that is far too high to allow the maintenance of causal alleles simply by the generation of those alleles through mutation.

Noninfectious environmental influences may help explain some of these associations, but so far as primary causation of severe mental illnesses is concerned, none of the noninfectious environmental or allelic candidates have stood up to the evidence to date as well as infectious candidates. The arguments will eventually move toward resolution through the discovery of the causal agents whether they be alleles, pathogens or some noninfectious environmental influence. Alleles have been claimed as major causes of these diseases but retractions have followed claims as soon as adequate follow-up studies have been conducted. In contrast, evidence for associations between infectious agents and severe mental illnesses has mounted over the past decade in spite of much less funding support.

The associations between mental illness and creativity make sense from an evolutionary perspective. If our minds evolved to solve the challenges associated with hunting/gathering societies, we can expect the normal mind to be poorly equipped to solve some of the accomplishments valued by modern society, whether they be a new style of painting or complex mathematical proofs. If neuronal networks could fire differently, then new mental processes could be generated. Most of the re-networking that accompanies severe mental illnesses makes a person less functional for the tasks valued by society. But every now and then the reorganized brain generates something different, something that we consider extremely valuable. To distinguish this abnormality that we esteem from the abnormality that we pity, we use the term genius. If the geniuses of today were mentally ill at a rate no greater than that of the general population, then we could reasonably assume that genius was simply one tail of the naturally selected distribution of intellectual capacities.

The high rates of mental illness highest achievers, particularly in the arts, however, demand a different explanation. If the illnesses associated with such creativity are caused by infection and the infection cannot be explained as a consequence of the creative lifestyle, as indicated by the season of birth associations, then the range of feasible explanations is narrowed. The least tortuous conclusion is that prenatal infections damage the development of the brain, generating a brain that functions differently from the naturally selected brain. Most of the time these pathogens just muck up the mind, causing mental illness without generating anything in return. But in a few lucky throws of the dice, a different mind that is brilliantly creative.

At this level of accomplishment it is looking more and more like the we in we do not just belong to Homo sapiens but also to a variety of parasitic species. It may include human herpes simplex virus, borna disease virus, Toxoplasma gondii, and many more yet to be discovered species that alter the functioning of our brains, usually for the worse, but occasionally generating minds of unusual insight. Richard Dawkins's concepts of the extended phenotype and meme return with extended license. In addition to viewing characteristics of an organism as an extension of a manipulator species for the benefit of manipulator genes, some characteristics that humans prize as the best of what makes humans human may be side effects that do not actually benefit the manipulator. They are in effect cultural mutations generated as side effects of biological parasitism. Like biological mutations the cultural mutations are often detrimental, but sometimes they may create something that humans value: A Starry Night, The Raven, Nash equilibria, or perhaps even calculus. The devastation associated with these characteristics, which often involves extreme fitness loss — suicide with damage rather than benefit to kin — cannot be explained by natural selection acting solely upon humans. The principles of natural selection emphasize that we have to consider other species that live intimately within us as part of us, affecting our neurons, shaping our minds.