Fwd: Edge 203: Carolyn Porco - Marvin Minsky - H. Allen Orr

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From: Edge <editor@edge.org>
Date: 28 Feb 2007 21:43
Subject: Edge 203: Carolyn Porco - Marvin Minsky - H. Allen Orr
To: Rhys Evans <wheresrhys@gmail.com>

February 27, 2007

EDGE 203
http://www.edge.org

[13,850 words]

This EDGE edition, at 13,850 words with graphics and links, is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html

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THE REALITY CLUB
H. Allen Orr Responds to Daniel C. Dennett

Can Dennett really believe that some facile argument about the probability of correctly assembling all of God's parts by chance alone is anything of the kind?† Does he really believe that God is (necessarily) complex in the same way as the universe, just more so?† And just what metric of complexity does Dennett take to extend so readily from the natural to the supernatural?† Does none of this trouble Dennett?† Are things really so neat as Dawkins says?
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#orr

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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NASA GOES DEEP
By Carolyn Porco

...instead of having a ubiquitous presence throughout the solar system, humans haven't set foot on the Moon in 35 years, and even our robotic explorations in that time have been throttled because we deliberately reduced our access to deep space.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#porco
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FALLING IN LOVE
By Marvin Minsky

"In faith, i do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note; But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise."
- Shakespeare

Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machine - so we often hear such statements as this:

"Citizen: Of course machines can do useful things. We can make them add up huge columns of numbers or assemble cars in factories. But nothing made of mechanical stuff could ever have genuine feelings like love".

No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways - nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness.

What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about?....

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[From Chapter 1: "Falling in Love",in The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Excerpted with permission of the publisher.]

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#minsky
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IN THE NEWS
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The New York Times
SCIENCE TIMES | FINDINGS
An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies'
By John Tierney

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn't plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They'll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They'll stop worrying about "frankenfoods" and embrace genetic engineering.

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable - or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.

He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he's been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called "America Needs Indians." That's somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.

But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks - a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.

Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long - as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker - that he's become a cottage industry in academia.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#tierney
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The New York Times
OPINION
Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox
By David Brooks

Can we please get over the hipster parent moment? Can we please see the end of those Park Slope alternative Stepford Moms in their black-on-black maternity tunics who turn their babies into fashion-forward, anticorporate indie-infants in order to stay one step ahead of the cool police?

Can we stop hearing about downtown parents who dress their babies in black skull slippers, Punky Monkey T-shirts and camo toddler ponchos until the little ones end up looking like sad-parody club clones of mom and dad? Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies' iPods?

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#brooks.eno
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Sueddeutsche Zeitung
FEUILLETON
Was läuft hier richtig?
Der neue Optimism
Ralf Bönt

Ein nüchterner Blick auf die Geschichte zeigt, dass Optimismus grundsätzlich gerechtfertigt ist. Denn heute ist die Gewalt als bestimmendes Moment der Menschheitsgeschichte auf dem Rückzug. Darauf weist der Psychologe Steven Pinker von der Harvard University im Internetforum edge.org hin, in dem er zusammen mit 160 anderen Kollegen und Kolleginnen auf die Frage antwortet, was sie optimistisch mache. Es möge überraschen, so Pinker, aber die Gewalt habe seit Jahrhunderten drastisch abgenommen. Der Völkermord als gängige Form der Konfliktlösung, das Attentat zur Erbfolgeregelung, Exekution und Folter als Strafe, Sklaverei aus Faulheit und Habgier seien heute Seltenheiten und, wo sie aufträten, Gegenstand heftigerKritik. Was lief hier richtig? fragt Pinker, und stellt fest, dass wir wenig zu antworten wissen. Dies läge wohl daran, dass wir immer danach fragten, warum es Krieg gibt, und niemals, wieso der Frieden da ist. ......Fast alle Antworten in der Sammlung, die demnächst als Buch erscheint, sind von solchem Optimismus getragen. Geograph und Biologe Jared Diamond ist optimistisch, weil es in der Wirtschaft manchmal Entscheidungen gibt, die auch für die Menschheit gut sind. Brian Eno ist es, weil die Akzeptanz der Erder-wärmung das größte Versagen des Marktes transparent gemacht habe. J. Craig Venter erwartet eine Revolution der Entscheidungskultur, wenn außerhalb der Wissenschaft ihre jüngsten Methoden übernommen werden. Diese beruhten vor allem auf dem Erkennen irrelevanter Informationen. Die Zukunft ist also kein Überwachungsstaat. Vor allem die Infor ation-stechnologie ist unter den Optimisten im Trend. Auch Afrika, der verlorene Kontinent, erlebt hier einen Boom, der viel verändern wird.

Einzig Nobelpreisträger Frank Wilczek macht Hoffnung, dass es die alles erklärende Theorie, jene Weltformel, die als „Einsteins Traum" bekannt ist, nie geben wird. Man sollte seine Worte besser wählen, meint der Physiktheoretiker. Er lässt so eine unter seines-gleichen seltene Demut gegenüber der Schöpfung erkennen, deren Gedanke er nicht für die Hoffnung auf ein wissenschaftliches Erlösungsmoment opfern will.

Martin Rees, dessen Royal Society übrigens einst den Prioritätenstreit zwischen Newton und Leibniz um die Infinitesimalrechnung falsch zu Gunsten des Engländers entschied, äußerte sich auch: Er habe viele Zuschriften bekommen, sein Buch sei noch beschönigend und er selbst ein unverbesserlicher Optimist. Das, schreibt er nun, wolle er bleiben. Dennet gibt zwar zu, an schlechten Tagen den düsteren Szenarien seines Kollegen anhängen zu können. Als größte Gefahr macht er jedoch etwas anderes als der Physiker aus: Die gute alte Überreaktion.

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#sz
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Reforma
Optimismo...
By Juan Enríquez Cabot

Las tragedias individuales, dice Anderson, venden muchos más periódicos y atraen muchos más televidentes que las tendencias generales

A menudo, después de abrir el periódico, ver las noticias o vivir algún suceso especialmente triste, acaba uno con la idea de que el mundo era mucho mejor antes y que vamos rumbo a la decadencia, soledad, podredumbre y extrema violencia. En algunas partes y épocas efectivamente es así. Pero no lo es en general...Dos amigos míos me recordaron, en escritos de fin de año, que hay mucho que criticar, afrontar, cambiar, pero también hay mucho que celebrar. Chris Anderson escribió sobre el extremo sobrerreportaje que ocurre cuando hay un incidente terrorista, accidente masivo o desastre natural. Esto ocurre porque, en la mayoría del mundo, este tipo de muertes violentas no son lugar común. Hay grandes reportajes precisamente porque son sucesos excepcionales.Las tragedias individuales, dice Anderson, venden muchos más periódicos y atraen muchos más televidentes que las tendencias generales. "Perro ataca inocente infante" es mucho más poderoso que "la pobreza se redujo en un 1 por ciento". Pero aunque la segunda nota es mucho menos atractiva en términos mediáticos significa salvar y mejorar muchas más vidas.

Mucho se ha escrito sobre cómo la red, Google, Yahoo, Skype, You Tube eliminan distancias y reducen el costo de la comunicación, de lograr comunicación y obtener información global a casi cero. El resultado de estar siempre conectados a todas partes a todas horas es que las distancias se reducen y que individuales dramas mundiales entran, cada vez más, a nuestras casas a diario. Podemos enterarnos 24 x 7 sobre incendios, bombas, asaltos, torturas, desapariciones, violaciones y escándalos políticos en cualquiera de los casi 200 países del planeta. Una foto, un testimonial, un videoclip de 15 segundos, nos acercan a más y más dramas individuales. Cada historia nos convence, un poquito más, de que vivimos en mundo cruel, duro y violento...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#reforma
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The New York Times
OPINION
Human Nature Redux
By David Brooks

Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness....

...Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

>From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We're tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.

This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don't understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other's throats are valuable and are altered at great peril. ...

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#brooks
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The New York Times
SCIENCE TIMES
A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life
By Dennis Overbye

Carl Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave, with "new" words on the boundary between science and religion.

...Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication last month of "The Varieties of Scientific  Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God" (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.

Reading Dr. Sagan's new book is like running into an old friend at a noisy party, discovering he still has all his hair, and repairing to the den for a quiet, congenial drink.

"I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship," he writes at the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, a travel guide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in the brain, and the meaning of the potential discovery - or lack thereof - of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. Sagan warns at one point of the danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God's plan. ...

...In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. "A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it anymore," Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.

Some of the books that resulted, such as Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion," have been criticized as shrill, but Ms. Druyan said: "People like Carl and Dawkins are more serious about God than people who just go through the motions. They are real seekers."...

...Dr. Sagan was many things, but shrill was not one of them.
The last word may as well go to Dr. Dawkins himself, who in a 1996 book nominated Dr. Sagan as the ideal spokesman for Earth. In a blurb for the new book, Dr. Dawkins said that the astronomer was more than religious, having left behind the priests and mullahs.

"He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about," Dr. Dawkins wrote. "They have their Bronze Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the universe."

[...more]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html#overbye
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This EDGE edition, at 13,850 words with graphics and links, is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge203.html
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EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private  operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of  the Internal Revenue Code.
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