Probably not unknown to some of you, this website asks a group of scientists/scholars from various fields an interesting question. This years question was "What is your dangerous idea? The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?"
Quite a read with 119 contributors and a total of 75,000 words, but some of the ideas are pretty interesting (and scary). Examples:
These are just two examples I found interesting. 119 submission is kinda intimidating, and some of the subjects are quite heavy on the technical side, but some of the articles I really recommend. The submissions from Robert Schank, Geoffrey Miller, Sherry Turkle, Judith Rich Harris, Robert Shapiro and Ernst Poppel are very interesting. GAF'ers may be particularly interested in Keith Devlin's idea (What if we [mankind on Earth] are alone?) and Terrence Sejnowski (When will the Internet become aware of itself?) Some of those articles were featured (in shortened versions) in a newspaper here in NL (NRC), that's how I found the site.
Quite a read with 119 contributors and a total of 75,000 words, but some of the ideas are pretty interesting (and scary). Examples:
Kai Krause - Researcher said:Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an all too practical sense
Dangerous Ideas? It is dangerous ideas you want? From this group of people ? That in itself ought to be nominated as one of the more dangerous ideas...
Danger is ubiquitous. If recent years have shown us anything, it should be that "very simple small events can cause real havoc in our society". A few hooded youths play cat and mouse with the police: bang, thousands of burned cars put all of Paris into a complete state of paralysis, mandatory curfew and the entire system in shock and horror.
My first thought was: what if any really smart set of people really set their mind to it...how utterly and scarily trivial it would be, to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society to a dead stop?
The relative innocence and stable period of the last 50 years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn't haphazard testosterone driven riots, where they cannibalize their own neighborhood, much like in L.A. in the 80s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy ? What if Slashdotters start musing aloud about "Gee, the L.A. water supply is rather simplistic, isn't it?" An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition ? Hacking L.A. may be a lot easier than hacking IE.
That is basic banter over a beer in a bar, I don't even want to actually speculate what a serious set of brainiacs could conjure up. And I refuse to even give it any more print space here. However, the danger of such sad memes is what requires our attention!
In fact, I will broaden the specter still: its not violent crime and global terrorism I worry about, as much as the basic underpinning of our entire civilization coming apart, as such. No acts of malevolence, no horrible plans by evil dark forces, neither the singular "Bond Nemesis" kind, nor masses of religious fanatics. None of that needed... It is the glue that is coming apart to topple this tower. And no, I am not referring to "spiraling trillions of debt".
No, what I am referring to is a slow process I observed over the last 30 years, ever since in my teens I wondered "How would this world work, if everyone were like me ?" and realized: it wouldn't !
It was amazing to me that there were just enough people to make just enough shoes so that everyone can avoid walking barefoot. That there are people volunteering to spend day-in, day-out, being dentists, and lawyers and salesmen. Almost any "jobjob" I look at, I have the most sincere admiration for the tenacity of the people...how do they do it? It would drive me nuts after hours, let alone years...Who makes those shoes ?
That was the wondrous introspection in adolescent phases, searching for a place in the jigsaw puzzle.
But in recent years, the haunting question has come back to me: "How the hell does this world function at all? And does it, really ? I feel an alienation zapping through the channels, I can't find myself connecting with those groups of humanoids trouncing around MTV. Especially the glimpses of "real life": on daytime-courtroom-dramas or just looking at faces in the street. On every scale, the closer I observe it, the more the creeping realization haunts me: individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries... they all just barely hang in there, between debt and dysfunction. The whole planet looks like Any town with mini malls cutting up the landscape and just down the road it's all white trash with rusty car wrecks in the back yard. A huge Groucho Club I don't want to be a member of.
But it does go further: what is particularly disturbing to see is this desperate search for Individualism that has rampantly increased in the last decade or so.
Everyone suddenly needs to be so special, be utterly unique. So unique that they race off like lemmings to get 'even more individual' tattoos, branded cattle, with branded chains in every mall, converging on a blanded sameness world wide, but every rap singer with ever more gold chains in ever longer stretched limos is singing the tune: Don't be a loser! Don't be normal! The desperation with which millions of youngsters try to be that one-in-a-million professional ball player may have been just a "sad but silly factoid" for a long time.
But now the tables are turning: the anthill is relying on the behaviour of the ants to function properly. And that implies: the social behaviour, the role playing, taking defined tasks and follow them through.
What if each ant suddenly wants to be the queen? What if soldiering and nest building and cleaning chores is just not cool enough any more?
If AntTV shows them every day nothing but un-Ant behaviour...?
In my youth we were whining about what to do and how to do it, but in the end,all of my friends did become "normal" humans, orthopedics and lawyers, social workers, teachers... There were always a few that lived on the edges of normality, like ending up as television celebrities, but on the whole: they were perfectly reasonable ants. 1.8 children, 2.7 cars, 3.3 TVs...
Now: I am no longer confident that line will continue. If every honeymoon is now booked in Bali on a Visa card, and every kid in Borneo wants to play ball in NYC... can the network of society be pliable enough to accommodate total upheaval? And what if 2 billion Chinese and Indians raise a generation of kids staring 6+ hours a day into All American values they can never attain... being taunted with Hollywood movies of heroic acts and pathetic dysfunctionality, coupled with ever increasing violence and disdain for ethics or morals.
Seeing scenes of desperate youths in South American slums watching "Kill Bill" makes me think: this is just oxygen thrown into the fire... The ants will not play along much longer. The anthill will not survive if even a small fraction of the system is falling apart.
Couple that inane drive for "Super Individualism" (and the Quest for Coolness by an ever increasing group destined to fail miserably) with the scarily simple realization of how effective even a small set of desperate people can become, then add the obvious penchant for religious fanaticism and you have an ugly picture of the long term future.
So many curves that grow upwards towards limits, so many statistics that show increases and no way to turn around.
Many in this forum may speculate about infinite life spans, changing the speed of light, finding ways to decode consciousness, wormholes to other dimensions and finding grand unified theories.
To make it clear: I applaud that! "It does take all kinds".
Diversity is indeed one of the definitions of the meaning of life.
Edge IS Applied Diversity.
Those are viable and necessary questions for mankind as a whole, however: I believe we need to clean house, re-evaluate, redefine the priorities.
While we look at the horizon here in these pages, it is the very ground beneath us, that may be crumbling. The ant hill could really go to ant hell! Next year, let's ask for good ideas. Really practical, serious, good ideas. "The most immediate positive global impact of any kind that can be achieved within one year?". How to envision Internet3 and Web3 as a real platform for a global brainstorming with 6+ billion potential participants.
This was not meant to sound like doom and gloom naysaying. I see myself as a sincere optimist, but one who believes in realistic pessimism as a useful tool to initiate change.]
Stephen M. Kosslyn -Psychologist said:A Science of the Divine?
Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order. Simply stating these ideas in the same breath invites them to scrape against each other, and sparks begin to fly. To avoid such conflict, Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that we should separate religion and science, treating them as distinct "magisteria." But science leads many of us to try to understand all that we encounter with a single, grand and glorious overarching framework. In this spirit, let me try to suggest one way in which the idea of a "supreme being" can fit into a scientific worldview.
I offer the following not to advocate the ideas, but rather simply to illustrate one (certainly not the only) way that the concept of God can be approached scientifically.
1.0. First, here's the specific conception of God I want to explore: God is a "supreme being" that transcends space and time, permeates our world but also stands outside of it, and can intervene in our daily lives (partly in response to prayer).
2.0. A way to begin to think about this conception of the divine rests on three ideas:
2.1. Emergent properties. There are many examples in science where aggregates produce an entity that has properties that cannot be predicted entirely from the elements themselves. For example, neurons in large numbers produce minds; moreover, minds in large numbers produce economic, political, and social systems.
2.2. Downward causality. Events at "higher levels" (where emergent properties become evident) can in turn feed back and affect events at lower levels. For example, chronic stress (a mental event) can cause parts of the brain to become smaller. Similarly, an economic depression or the results of an election affect the lives of the individuals who live in that society.
2.3. The Ultimate Superset. The Ultimate Superset (superordinate set) of all living things may have an equivalent status to an economy or culture. It has properties that emerge from the interactions of living things and groups of living things, and in turn can feed back to affect those things and groups.
3.0. Can we conceive of God as an emergent property of all living things that can in turn affect its constituents? Here are some ways in which this idea is consistent with the nature of God, as outlined at the outset.
3.1. This emergent entity is "transcendent" in the sense that it exists in no specific place or time. Like a culture or an economy, God is nowhere, although the constituent elements occupy specific places. As for transcending time, consider this analogy: Imagine that 1/100th of the neurons in your brain were replaced every hour, and each old neuron programmed a new one so that the old one's functionality was preserved. After 100 hours your brain would be an entirely new organ but your mind would continue to exist as it had been before. Similarly, as each citizen dies and is replaced by a child, the culture continues to exist (and can grow and develop, with a "life of its own"). So too with God. For example, in the story of Jacob's ladder, Jacob realizes "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." (Genesis 28: 16) I interpret this story as illustrating that God is everywhere but nowhere. The Ultimate Superset permeates our world but also stands outside of (or, more specifically, "above") it.
3.2. The Ultimate Superset can affect our individual lives. Another analogy: Say that geese flying south for the winter have rather unreliable magnetic field detectors in their brains. However, there's a rule built into their brains that leads them to try to stay near their fellows as they fly. The flock as a whole would navigate far better than any individual bird, because the noise in the individual bird brain navigation systems would cancel out. The emergent entity the flock in turn would affect the individual geese, helping them to navigate better than they could on their own.
3.3. When people pray to the Lord, they beseech intervention on their or others' behalf. The view that I've been outlining invites us to think of the effects of prayer as akin to becoming more sensitive to the need to stay close to the other birds in the flock: By praying, one can become more sensitive to the emergent "supreme being." Such increased sensitivity may imply that one can contribute more strongly to this emergent entity.
By analogy, it's as if one of those geese became aware of the "keep near" rule, and decided to nudge the other birds in a particular direction which thereby allows it to influence the flock's effect on itself. To the extent that prayer puts one closer to God, one's plea for intervention will have a larger impact on the way that The Ultimate Superset exerts downward causality. But note that, according to this view, God works rather slowly. Think of dropping rocks in a pond: it takes time for the ripples to propagate and eventually be reflected back from the edge, forming interference patterns in the center of the pond.
4.0. A crucial idea in monotheistic religions is that God is the Creator. The present approach may help us begin to grapple with this idea, as follows.
4.1. First, consider each individual person. The environment plays a key role in creating who and what we are because there are far too few genes to program every aspect of our brains. For example, when you were born, your genes programmed many connections in your visual areas, but did not specify the precise circuits necessary to determine how far away objects are. As an infant, the act of reaching for an object tuned the brain circuits that estimate how far away the object was from you.
Similarly, your genes graced you with the ability to acquire language, but not with a specific language. The act of acquiring a language shapes your brain (which in turn may make it difficult to acquire another language, with different sounds and grammar, later in life). Moreover, cultural practices configure the brains of members of the culture. A case in point: the Japanese have many forms of bowing, which are difficult for a Westerner to master relatively late in life; when we try to bow, we "bow with an accent."
4.2. And the environment not only played an essential role in how we developed as children, but also plays a continuing role in how we develop over the course of our lives as adults. The act of learning literally changes who and what we are.
4.3. According to this perspective, it's not just negotiating the physical world and sociocultural experience that shape the brain: The Ultimate Superset the emergent property of all living things affects all of the influences that "make us who and what we are," both as we develop during childhood and continue to learn and develop as adults.
4.4. Next, consider our species. One could try to push this perspective into a historical context, and note that evolution by natural selection reflects the effects of interactions among living things. If so, then the emergent properties of such interactions could feed back to affect the course of evolution itself.
In short, it is possible to begin to view the divine through the lens of science. But such reasoning does no more than set the stage; to be a truly dangerous idea, this sort of proposal must be buttressed by the results of empirical test. At present, my point is not to convince, but rather to intrigue. As much as I admired Stephen Jay Gould (and I did, very much), perhaps he missed the mark on this one. Perhaps there is a grand project waiting to be launched, to integrate the two great sources of knowledge and belief in the world today science and religion.
These are just two examples I found interesting. 119 submission is kinda intimidating, and some of the subjects are quite heavy on the technical side, but some of the articles I really recommend. The submissions from Robert Schank, Geoffrey Miller, Sherry Turkle, Judith Rich Harris, Robert Shapiro and Ernst Poppel are very interesting. GAF'ers may be particularly interested in Keith Devlin's idea (What if we [mankind on Earth] are alone?) and Terrence Sejnowski (When will the Internet become aware of itself?) Some of those articles were featured (in shortened versions) in a newspaper here in NL (NRC), that's how I found the site.
. Dozens of the sharpest minds mankind has to offer talk about shit they think's dangerous, and all we get is a reply from someone with 'emo' in his name. I blame it on the weekend.