What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
336
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
336eBook
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Overview
The world's leading scientific thinkers explore bold, remarkable, perilous ideas that could change our lives—for better . . . or for worse . . .
From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out to be true.
What do the world's leading scientists and thinkers consider to be their most dangerous idea? Through the leading online forum Edge (www.edge.org), the call went out, and this compelling and easily digestible volume collects the answers. From using medication to permanently alter our personalities to contemplating a universe in which we are utterly alone, to the idea that the universe might be fundamentally inexplicable, What Is Your Dangerous Idea? takes an unflinching look at the daring, breathtaking, sometimes terrifying thoughts that could forever alter our world and the way we live in it.
Contributors include
Daniel C. Dennett • Jared Diamond • Brian Greene • Matt Ridley • Howard Gardner and Freeman Dyson, among others
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061844805 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2009 |
| Series: | Edge Question Series |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 615 KB |
About the Author
The publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, John Brockman is the editor of Know This, This Idea Must Die, This Explains Everything, This Will Make You Smarter, and other volumes.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
We Have No Souls
John Horgan
John Horgan is the director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author, most recently, of Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment.
This year's Edge question makes me wonder: Which ideas pose a greater potential danger? False ones or true ones? Illusions or the lack thereof? As a believer in and lover of science, I certainly hope that the truth will set us free, and save us, but sometimes I'm not so sure.
The dangerous (probably true) idea I'd like to dwell on is that we humans have no souls. The soul is that core of us that supposedly transcends, and even persists beyond, our physicality, lending us a fundamental autonomy, privacy, and dignity. In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, the late, great Francis Crick argued that the soul is an illusion perpetuated, like Tinkerbell, only by our belief in it. Crick opened his book with this manifesto: "'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Note the quotation marks around "You." The subtitle of Crick's book was almost comically ironic, since he was clearly trying not to find the soul but to crush it out of existence.
I once told Crick that "The Depressing Hypothesis" would have been a more accurate title for his book, since he was, after all, just reiterating the basic, materialist assumption of modernneurobiology and, more broadly, all of science. Until recently, it was easy to dismiss this assumption as moot, because brain researchers had made so little progress in tracing cognition to specific neural processes. Even self-proclaimed materialists, who intellectually accept the idea that we are just meat machines, could harbor a secret sentimental belief in a soul of the gaps. But recently the gaps have been closing, as neuroscientists—egged on by Crick in the last two decades of his life—have begun unraveling the so-called neural code, the software that transforms electrochemical pulses in the brain into perceptions, memories, decisions, emotions, and other constituents of consciousness.
I've argued elsewhere that the neural code may turn out to be so complex that it will never be fully deciphered. But sixty years ago some biologists feared the genetic code was too complex to crack. Then, in 1953, Crick and James Watson unraveled the structure of DNA, and researchers quickly established that the double helix mediates an astonishingly simple genetic code governing the heredity of all organisms. Science's success in deciphering the genetic code, which has culminated in the Human Genome Project, has been widely acclaimed—and with good reason, because knowledge of our genetic makeup could allow us to reshape our innate nature. A solution to the neural code could give us much greater, more direct control over ourselves than mere genetic manipulation.
Will we be liberated or enslaved by this knowledge? Officials in the Pentagon, the major funder of neural code research, have openly broached the prospect of cyborg warriors who can be remotely controlled via brain implants, like the assassin in the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate. On the other hand, a cultlike group of self-described "wireheads" looks forward to the day when implants allow us to create our own realities and achieve ecstasy on demand.
Either way, when our minds can be programmed like personal computers, then perhaps we will finally abandon the belief that we have immortal, inviolable souls—unless, of course, we program ourselves to believe.
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable. Copyright © by John Brockman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Table of Contents
Preface: The Edge Question xvii
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction Steven Pinker xxiii
Contributors
We Have No Souls 1
The Rejection of Soul 4
The Evolution of Evil 7
The Differences Between Humans and Nonhumans Are Quantitative, Not Qualitative 10
Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments 13
The Genetic Basis of Human Behavior 16
Marionettes on Genetic Strings 19
Francis Crick's Dangerous Idea 22
Being Alone in the Universe 27
Life as an Agent of Energy Dispersal 29
We Are Entirely Alone 33
Science May Be Running Out of Control 35
Why I Hope the Standard Model Is Wrong About Why There Is More Matter Than Antimatter 38
The Idea That We Understand Plutonium 40
The Idea That We Should All Share Our Most Dangerous Ideas 41
The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous 42
The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost 43
Think Outside the Kyoto Box 45
Our Planet Is Not in Peril 50
The Effect of Art Can't Be Controlled or Anticipated 54
A "Grand Narrative" 55
Our Universal Moral Grammar's Immunity to Religion 59
Bertrand Russell's Dangerous Idea 62
Hodgepodge Morality 63
We Will Understand the Origin of Life Within the Next Five Years 65
Understanding Molecular Biology Without Discovering the Origins of Life 69
The Problem with Super Mirrors 70
Cyberdisinhibition 73
Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies 76
What Are People Well Informed About in the Information Age? 80
More Anonymity Is Good 82
A New Golden Age of Medicine 84
Using Medications to Change Personality 90
Drugs May Change the Patterns of Human Love 92
A Marriage Option for All 95
Choosing the Sex of One's Child 97
The Idea of Ideas 101
The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe 102
The World May Be Fundamentally Inexplicable 105
The "Landscape" 108
Seeing Darwin in the Light of Einstein; Seeing Einstein in the Light of Darwin 112
The Multiverse 117
What Twentieth-Century Physics Says About the World Might Be True 120
It's a Matter of Time 122
A Radical Re-evaluation of the Character of Time 126
It's OK Not to Know Everything 128
The End of Insight 130
When Will the Internet Become Aware of Itself? 132
Democratizing Access to the Means of Invention 137
Mind Is a Universally Distributed Quality 139
The Forbidden Fruit Intuition 143
The Posterior Probability of Any Particular God Is Pretty Small 146
Science Must Destroy Religion 148
The Self Is a Conceptual Chimera 152
The Greatest Story Ever Told 153
Science as Just Another Religion 156
This Is All There Is 159
A Science of the Divine? 162
Science Will Never Silence God 167
Religion Is the Hope That Is Missing in Science 169
Myths and Fairy Tales Are Not True 173
Parental Licensure 175
Zero Parental Influence 177
The Focus on Emotional Intelligence 181
A Cacophony of "Controversy" 182
Applied History 184
Tribal Peoples Often Damage Their Environments and Make War 186
Nothing 187
Everything Is Pointless 188
There Aren't Enough Minds to House the Population Explosion of Memes 189
Unspeakable Ideas 193
Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an All-Too-Practical Sense 196
Navigating by New Scientific Principles 201
A Political System Based on Empathy 204
Social Relativity 207
There Is Something New Under the Sun -Us 209
A Spoon Is Like a Headache 211
Projection of the Longevity Curve 214
The Near-Term Inevitability of Radical Life Extension and Expansion 215
The Domestication of Biotechnology 218
Public Engagement in Science and Technology 220
Suppose Faulkner Was Right? 221
What If the Unknown Becomes Known and Is Not Replaced with a New Unknown? 225
Where Goods Cross Frontiers, Armies Won't 227
Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution 229
The Free Market 232
Modern Science Is a Product of Biology 234
No More Teacher's Dirty Looks 235
We Are All Virtual 238
Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox 240
Simulation Versus Authenticity 244
Culture Is Natural 248
The Human Brain Is a Cultural Artifact 252
Free Will Is Exercised Unconsciously 256
Free Will Is Going Away 259
The Limits of Introspection 263
What We Know May Not Change Us 266
Telling More Than We Can Know 269
The Quick-Thinking Zombies Inside Us 273
The Banality of Evil, the Banality of Heroism 275
Open-Source Currency 277
Is the West Already on a Downhill Course? 279
Technology Can Untie the United States 282
Democracy May Be on Its Way Out 286
Marx Was Right: The State Will Evaporate 288
Following Sisyphus 290
How Can I Trust, in the Face of So Many Unknowables? 292
A Twenty-Four-Hour Period of Absolute Solitude 294
Afterword Richard Dawkins 297