World Famous Comics: What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything
What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything
By: John Brockman Publisher: Harper Perennial Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Harper Perennial Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 416 Publication Date: January 01, 2009 Release Date: January 06, 2009
Edge (www.edge.org), the influential online intellectual salon, recently asked 150 high-powered thinkers to discuss their most telling missteps and reconsiderations: What have you changed your mind about? The answers were brilliant, eye-opening, fascinating, sometimes shocking, and certain to kick-start countless passionate debates.
Read Steven Pinker on the future of human evolution • Richard Dawkins on the mysteries of courtship • Sam Harris on the indifference of Mother Nature • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the irrelevance of probability • Chris Anderson on the reality of global warming • Alan Alda on the existence of God • Lisa Randall on the secrets of the Sun • Ray Kurzweil on the possibility of extraterrestrial life • Brian Eno on what it means to be a "revolutionary" • Helen Fisher on love, fidelity, and the viability of marriage • Irene Pepperberg on learning from parrots. . . and many others.
Reads like a bunch of commencement addresses Okay. Here's the pitch. We'll take an interesting question and pose it to a bunch of fascinating people.
Then the magic will just happen.
The question was great: What have you changed your mind about? In other words where did you screw up and make a mistake? In the introductory material we even learn the parameters. A change of heart owing to thinking is philosophy. A change of heart owing to God is religion and a change of heart owing to new facts is science.
Great premise. And it would've been wonderful if they had posed this question to people like the attorney's who drafted the pro Abu Gharib memorandums for the Bush administration or alternatively if they had addressed the question to corporate fathers of Enron or the geniuses who were behind or country's current economic woes.
It would've even been wonderful if they'd given this question to the same people they did but actually had them answer it honestly instead of, for the most part, self servingly. (Genius and error are not mutually exclusive. For his part Albert Einstein was repeatedly candid about errors in his work. Theodore Roosevelt was too. In fact, said Roosevelt, he didn't fear error, but rather "that gray twilight" of not even trying.)
But the writers didn't answer honestly. A great case in point was Richard Dawkins who's "error" came from over thirty years ago on a matter so minor I don't even remember what it was. But it doesn't matter what it was because, according to Dawkins, he was right to be wrong at the time anyway.
Oh sure, there were some exceptions like Helen Fisher and Lee Smolin, two among a dozen or so writers who actually honestly answered the question. But for the most part, this book read like a bunch of commencement addresses...plaitudinal, irrelevant, and boring.
Of course it's mixed... isn't that the point? Most non-fiction books are written to advance a thesis; to present a conclusion, a theory which explains the facts. When you realize that you've got something wrong, that you have to change your mind, it's natural to be somewhat restrained about the fact. After all, we live in a society that demands certainty - however absurd that expectation may be - and castigates people as "flip-floppers". I think that we could all benefit from reading about how thoughtful men and women were humble and open enough to admit that they were wrong.
Oh sure, this is a mixed bag. There are a few essays where you get to the end and scratch your head, wondering whatever happened to the purported change. But most are excellent. There are some obvious common themes: cosmology, evolution, climate change, science and religion, gender, consciousness. It seems intuitively obvious that these big questions which have both a scientific and a societal dimension will be associated with skepticism and revision.
Any reader of a book like this is going to be faced with the personal question: what have I changed my mind about? Well, 10 years ago I was in the computational neuroscience camp: I thought that the Churchlands had got most of it right. Somewhere along the way, I realized that biology, from the simplest plants to the most cerebral animals, was actually based on information systems. I'm not talking about computers as metaphors for brains, or anything like that; I mean that at some, very early point, the self-replicating information patterns co-opted and started to organize the material substrates of life.
Very intellectually stimulating I enjoyed this book (actually a compilation of essays at the wonderful scientific websiteEdge.org). A number of prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran, and Freeman Dyson explain what they changed their mind on and why. I particularly enjoyed Dyson's essay, although his was about history, not science. (He discusses why the atomic bombs did not cause Japan to surrender). Anyone interested in science should not only get this book, they should frequent Edge.org.
A little disappointing Sorry - it's pretty equivocating - and mostly scientific "changes" not values - beliefs tough stuff.
Speculations on our human or transhuman future This is one of the finest of the `Edge Symposiums.' It is rich in ideas, speculations about what the future is going to be. Not all of these speculations are rosy, and a number of writers put forth doomsday ideas. The possibility of accidental nuclear war, the idea that we have already reached in many areas the best we are going to do and can expect from now on only Decline, the possibility that disaster may come through radical climate change, or though supernova explosion or asteroid collision are mentioned. But from my point of view the dark possibilities also grow out of some of the most optimistic prognoses. There are many essays here on various ways `humanity' is going to be transformed or transcended, rendered obsolete or irrelevant. There is talk of the singularity the moment when machine- intelligence replaces ours as prime - maker of our world. There are various speculations on ways in which our minds may be copied and then downloaded into machines which will then go on self- improving themselves cognitively. There are thoughts on ways we will engage in a cosmic competition and spread through the universe our silicon- descendants or perhaps viral heirs. There are also a whole host of speculations on shadow-worlds, parallel universes, perhaps microbically small, perhaps vast in ways we cannot imagine. There are too speculations of how we disappointed in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence are going to produce alternative intelligences who will become our real friends, and ensure that we are not lonely in the universe. What disturbs me in considering many of the essays is that they often seem to relate to humanity as if we were simply `minds' and not people who live lives, and have histories and complex relationships with other human beings. The whole presumption that some other kind of being can be manufactured by us or can somehow come out of our own researches seems to me a vast simplification as to what we in all our complexity are. Here I should note that there are a number of writers who question the very question of the project. One says nothing can possibly change everything, and another suggests that we cannot possibly know what the change will be, as we have in the past never been able to see the surprise which would come to take history and our understanding of the world in a new direction. I have made a slight summary here, but to do justice to the book and the ideas it is necessary to consider each of the essays and suggestions in and of itself. In almost all the cases this will be worthwhile as there is much to learn from them. i.e. The speculations do not come out of the air but out of solid scientific understanding . A number of the essays speculate on the end of illness and remarkably long lives. One speculates that the transformations will lead to a state of total satisfaction and happiness. This kind of idea seems to me again based on the kind of way human lives become meaningful through struggle, sacrifice, dedication , work and non- guaranteed outcomes. For me the excitement of a collection of this kind is not in any expectation that it will give `the answer'. Rather it is in the play of ideas, the richness of possibility. There is a pleasure of reading and feeling minds `at the top of the game'telling us what they think.
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