This year, the Edge World Question Center asks people what they have changed their minds about. Here are excerpts from some of the most interesting answers. (Not that I necessarily agree with them.)
Joseph LeDoux changed his mind about how memories are accessed in the brain.
Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning.
Tor Nørretranders now thinks that it’s more appropriate to think of your body as software, rather than hardware.
What is constant in you is not material. An average person takes in 1.5 ton of matter every year as food, drinks and oxygen. All this matter has to learn to be you. Every year. New atoms will have to learn to remember your childhood.
Helen Fischer now believes that human beings are serial monogamists.
Perhaps human parental bonds originally evolved to last only long enough to raise a single child through infancy, about four years, unless a second infant was conceived. By age five, a youngster could be reared by mother and a host of relatives. Equally important, both parents could choose a new partner and bear more varied young.
Paul Steinhardt is now skeptical about inflation.
Most cosmologists would say the answer is “inflation,” and, until recently, I would have been among them. But “facts have changed my mind” — and I now feel compelled to seek a new explanation that may or may not incorporate inflation.
John Baez is no longer enthusiastic about working on quantum gravity.
Jaron Lanier put it this way: “One gets the impression that some physicists have gone for so long without any experimental data that might resolve the quantum-gravity debates that they are going a little crazy.” But even more depressing was that as this debate raged on, cosmologists were making wonderful discoveries left and right, getting precise data about dark energy, dark matter and inflation. None of this data could resolve the string-loop war! Why? Because neither of the contending theories could make predictions about the numbers the cosmologists were measuring! Both theories were too flexible.
Xeni Jardin is depressed by the lack of spontaneous self-moderation in online communities…
But then, the audience grew. Fast. And with that, grew the number of antisocial actors, “drive-by trolls,” people for whom dialogue wasn’t the point. It doesn’t take many of them to ruin the experience for much larger numbers of participants acting in good faith.
…but Kevin Kelly is impressed by the success of Wikipedia.
How wrong I was. The success of the Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
Oliver Morton has changed his mind about human spaceflight.
I have, falteringly and with various intermediary about-faces and caveats, changed my mind about human spaceflight. I am of the generation to have had its childhood imagination stoked by the sight of Apollo missions on the television — I can’t put hand on heart and say I remember the Eagle landing, but I remember the sights of the moon relayed to our homes. I was fascinated by space and only through that, by way of the science fiction that a fascination with space inexorably led to, by science. And astronauts were what space was about.
Jonathan Haidt no longer believes that sports and fraternities are entirely bad. (This is my favorite.)
I was born without the neural cluster that makes boys find pleasure in moving balls and pucks around through space, and in talking endlessly about men who get paid to do such things. I always knew I could never join a fraternity or the military because I wouldn’t be able to fake the sports talk. By the time I became a professor I had developed the contempt that I think is widespread in academe for any institution that brings young men together to do groupish things. Primitive tribalism, I thought. Initiation rites, alcohol, sports, sexism, and baseball caps turn decent boys into knuckleheads. I’d have gladly voted to ban fraternities, ROTC, and most sports teams from my university.
I came to realize that being a successful scientific heretic is harder than it looks.
Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.
Stanislas Deheane now thinks there may be a unified theory of how the brain works.
Although a large extent of my work is dedicated to modelling the brain, I always thought that this enterprise would remain rather limited in scope. Unlike physics, neuroscience would never create a single, major, simple yet encompassing theory of how the brain works. There would be never be a single “Schrödinger’s equation for the brain”…
Well, I wouldn’t claim that anyone has achieved that yet… but I have changed my mind about the very possibility that such a law might exist.
Brian Eno’s disillusionment with Maoism changed his views on how politics can be transformative.
And then, bit by bit, I started to find out what had actually happened, what Maoism meant. I resisted for a while, but I had to admit it: I’d been willingly propagandised, just like Shaw and Mitford and d’Annunzio and countless others. I’d allowed my prejudices to dominate my reason. Those professors working in the countryside were being bludgeoned and humiliated. Those designers were put in the steel-foundries as ‘class enemies’ — for the workers to vent their frustrations upon. I started to realise what a monstrosity Maoism had been, and that it had failed in every sense.
Anton Zeilinger now believes that you should never describe your own research as “useless.” (Hmmm…)
When journalists asked me about 20 years ago what the use of my research is, I proudly told them that it has no use whatsoever. I saw an analog to the usefulness of astronomy or of a Beethoven symphony. We don’t do these things, I said, for their use, we do them because they are part of what it means to be human. In the same way, I said, we do basic science, in my case experiments on the foundations of quantum physics. it is part of being human to be curious, to want to know more about the world. There are always some of us who are just curious and they follow their nose and investigate with no idea in mind what it might be useful for.
Martin Rees thinks we need to take the “Posthuman Era” seriously.
Public discourse on very long-term planning is riddled with inconsistencies. Mostly we discount the future very heavily — investment decisions are expected to pay off within a decade or two. But when we do look further ahead — in discussions of energy policy, global warming and so forth — we underestimate the possible pace of transformational change. In particular, we need to keep our minds open — or at least ajar — to the possibility that humans themselves could change drastically within a few centuries.
It might sound a little crazy, but betting against Sir Martin is a bad idea.
Comments
66 responses to “What Have You Changed Your Mind About?”
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Paul Steinhardt said in his argument:
To a modal realist this is not “alarming” but deeply satisfying.
#1, did you actually read the article on Flew? How incredibly sad that they are manipulating him like that.
Chemicalscum on Jan 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 am
quoting Neil B.: Ahmed, as I’ve explained here before, even basic quantum indeterminacy means that the universe is not nor cannot be modeled by a “mathematical structure” pace modal realist type thinkers like Max Tegmark. Mathematics, being a logically mandated system, is deterministic.
Chemicalscum: Neil, I think Max would say you are taking a “frog’s eye” view.
~~~~
Well, maybe, but could you explain that, and most importantly give me a case to think I was wrong?
As for the bit about pockets with different laws, etc: I am doubtful that there is any appreciable handle on what makes laws of physics what they are and how they would vary. There are some ideas that some parameters would vary in certain ways (but is that really an example of “different laws” or just the same or deeper laws working out in different environments or contexts?) And what are the meta-laws determining that, and their justification in turn, etc.
Note well that a true modal realist believes that every possible universe, thing, whatever that is a “logically possible world” really exists, and I mean everything. That means whatever world can even be described, classical, like ours but without gravity, or even unlawful, or even the road runner cartoons in various manifestations (i.e., as the motions of denote points in coordinates etc.) The whole idea is, there is no purely *logical* way to define “existing” in the material sense we think is so intuitively or perceptually obvious. Therefore, all of the platonic “mindscape” equally exists. If you don’t get it that way, you don’t get it.
PS: Is it ever OK to use “.:” when a colon should come after a period, or too weird despite being technically correct?
NoJoy I did read that article, in what way do you think the NYT Magazine is manipulating his change of mind?
Garth
We could also mention from that Edge article Paul Davies .
What I cannot understand is the concept that one would be able to explain, as part of the scientific enterprise, the present laws of physics without invoking some higher set of ‘meta-laws’ which would determine how ‘our’ laws came to have the form we now find them in.
In which case would the set of ‘meta-laws’ itself exist in some ‘Platonic reality’?
Garth
It’s still Plato vs. Aristotle; Is the absolute an ideal from which we have fallen, or is it the essence out of which we rise?
I would go with Aristotle. Laws are as cumulative as the reality they describe. They are a reductionist model, not immutable foundation.
There is only the frog’s eye view and the bird is just a flying frog, because an objective perspective is an oxymoron.
Can “aha” moments be self evident? Can something that is self evident become an ideal? It is always a paradigmatic shift. And to think it was just waiting, always there, for someone to tap into it.
And some say, just look around you at what is.
In other words the identity 2 + 2 = 4 just evolves from an essence out of which it rises?…..
I think the most basic law is that similar cause yields similar effect…
That would be the ordered side of the equation. The chaotic side is that intersecting causes yield random effects. As experiments with cellular automata show, even feedback from within the same initial conditions can result in randomness…
But automata need an ordered background, computer simulation, biological life or whatever, to operate.
Whence that order?
Garth
“It might sound a little crazy, but betting against Sir Martin is a bad idea.”
Sean, it’s Lord Rees now, not Sir Martin. The man’s CV http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/IoA/staff/mjr/cv.html shows he is currently (since 2001) a trustee of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a Labour Party political think-tank. So maybe his prediction that “humans themselves could change drastically within a few centuries” is based on some political plan he has, like adding chemicals to the drinking water. The man recently sent out an unsolicited email from Lord Rees asking to be removed from a group physics discussion (someone else had sent him an email) because he claimed he had no time for physics, so I guess maybe he’s more busy now with politics.
Garth,
The problem with arguing it is that logic is ordering. It is inherently top down reductionism. The structure from which you, as an aware being, argue for order, isn’t modeled on some ideal form, but evolved from the bottom up, out of less complex organisms. Consciousness is a bottom up emergent phenomena, while the intellect is top down ordering of perspective.
Think of it in terms of growing up and the tendency of being young to think we know it all, because our perspective is limited and the more we learn, the broader our perspective, so the smaller the perception of our reality.
Another example; In terms of economics, capitalism is the eco-system in which corporations are the organisms. There is no one model of corporate structure, yet they all need some general area of focus in order to function effectively. There is no top down ideal or order, it is simply a bottom up evolutionary process and when they get too big for the conditions, they tend to break back down into smaller pieces.
It is our nature to try to make sense of reality and search for order in it and the most effective way is to find and study repeating patterns. That these patterns exist isn’t proof of some Platonic Ideal of which they are all copies, but that they are an effective answer to underlaying conditions and will change, should those conditions change, either by adapting or being replaced by more effective patterns.
Does this apply to laws? Is there some set of principles out there that govern physical reality, or are they effective patterns that develop to answer underlaying conditions? Are all hydrogen atoms the same because there is some elementary set of principles governing their shape, or do they respond to the same fundamental conditions similarly? Think in terms of more complex interactions; Are they a consequence of some ideal pattern, or are they simply a response to ever more primary conditions? Do laws even exist, if they are not physically expressed?
As I said, I think the basic law is that similar causes yield similar results. This explains repeatability. That changing causes changes effects, is a consequence of bottom up evolutionary processes. It is when we try to squeeze variability into previous patterns that do not account for these changes that our understanding gets sidetracked. So it is better to think in terms of bottom up processes, rather then top down patterns, if we want to understand, even though we, as individual beings, are a top down pattern, just as corporations exist as top down entities, even though they survive by climbing up.
The past is top down order. The future is bottom up process.
In a chaotic system similar causes yield very different results.
Hydrogen atoms are the same because there is an elementary set of principles, the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, which determines their structure.
Your argument assumes precedents – the wholesale reproduction of order that gradually evolves to allow the survival of the fittest that they might “climb up”. In biological evolution this is provided by the RNA/DNA ‘strange loop’, but in hoping that physical order should likewise evolve, be it through Smolin’s CNS hypothesis or whatever, a whole system of ‘meta-law’ or ‘meta-order’ is required to ensure that process can happen and continue to happen.
You may wish to believe that is how it actually happened, I just say such a belief requires a whole lot of faith.
Garth
35: John Merryman on Jan 4th, 2008 at 6:48 am
I think the most basic law is that similar cause yields similar effect…
No, not necessarily. Worse for a logical model of the world, identical causes can yield unequal results: two “identical” (AFAWK) mesons, and one decays one microsecond after its creation, the other decays three microseconds after its creation. That is logically absurd – we know of literally nothing we can find out about differences inside those meson, they are identical per all out ways of investigating them. And yet they don’t act the same (and don’t BS me that the probability was the same etc – sure, but the particles *didn’t act the same*) If this universe is a “simulation” and one particle was using one number’s square root as a random generator, and the other one used a different number, well that idea of clockwork inside the particles is a bit weird anyway, and we certainly can’t measure such a distinction – it is meaningless to claim. The universe is not a mathematical structure nor can even be represented by one (since math structures are deterministic from their logical nature.) Its being real partakes of “mystical” character, like it or not. (Why not just go ahead and like it, BTW?)
Garth,
I am taking one side of what is in many ways a dualistic, yin/yang situation, where any form of existance requires form. But it does seem to be a bootstrap process, where the complexity of form compounds as this process is propelled along. I wouldn’t say it’s faith, just projecting from what has been observed that eventually we find complex axioms are based on simpler sets of principles.
Yes, the further we go, the more difficult it gets to peel away each layer and find the one under it. Currently it’s string theory, but they certainly seem to be more a labyrinth of dimensions and vibrations then any physical reality of strings.
Bottom up process and top down form. Verbs and nouns. I think we are chasing our tail to a certain extent.
Neil,
Mystical or not, it’s still a good idea to look both ways before you cross the street.
What has been observed is the evolution of complexity, given the biological form of replicating living entities, which is based upon a chemical and physical form, which themselves are based upon an underlying mathematical form.
What has not been observed is the evolution of that mathematical form itself, it is a belief in this evolution from a state where such order was not preexistent that requires’ faith’.
Garth
Garth,
Does order exist if there is no expression of it? It is potential, but not actual. Sort of like potential for temperature at absolute zero. Once it moves/fluctuates, it starts simple. Such as opposites. Pretty much all of reality is a relationship of opposites. Presumably if you add all the matter and anti-matter, positives and negatives, etc., you are back to zero. Not that we ever actually get back to zero, but there is the messy tendency for complexity to evolve to the point it becomes unstable and it collapses back down until some point of equilibrium is re-established. So the absolute is zero. Empty space. That vacuum out of which we rise and to which we fall. Not an ideal form or other singular model of perfection, God, etc. from which we fell and seek to return.
It is an illusion, but not one Disney would produce.
Of course, it means life is a journey, not a destination. The end is just punctuation.
It is not the order of physical entities or biological life that I am disputing.
What Paul Davies changed his mind about was:
My point was, although I could see the physical laws changing as we now know them, say the value of G, I consider that they would have to change under the ‘control’ of some ‘higher’ law, otherwise the universe would be formless, “tohu-bohu- without form and void”.
Secondly, you did not answer Neil’s, or my, counter argument that similar causes do not necessarily yield similar effects.
Garth
Garth,
We think of math as being ordered, because it is a study of patterns, but there is still a lot of essential randomness that is repeating, but not predictable, like pi, or certain cellular automation equations. It is, just like evolution, potentially infinite, in that you start out with various simple concepts and they interact in increasingly complex fashion. Presumably an equation can be written to explain anything that exists, within statistical parameters, as it gets increasingly complex.
Notice I didn’t say ‘Identical cause yields identical effect, because there is a level of dynamic, quantum unpredicability, but for the simple stuff, by and large, the shortest distance between any two points tends to be a line. An equi-distant radius around a point is a circle. Any box with equal sides and equal angles is a square. Of course when you start factoring motion and have to add relativity, it starts getting exponentially complicated, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it gets illogical, or even non intuitive. For an example, it would seem that the uncertainty principle is a statement of the old adage that ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too.’ The more the process of motion/creation and consumption, the less determined the object in question. Noun vs. verb. I think the idea also applies to mathematics itself. The more we understand the process, the less real and more fleeting the presumed structure is.
John,
I still believe that 2 + 2 = 4, even if there are no objects to count and even when there are no minds around to think so. The relationships between mathematical objects are true in an atemporal way and not fleeting.
Garth
I haven’t changed my mind about anything really huge in science in a long time. I change my mind about small things in science all the time… indeed, changing one’s mind about small things shouldn’t be remarkable in science, because data is always coming in.
We haven’t really had a big conceptual revolution in at least the sciences that I’m familiar enough with recently, though.
I guess you could say that 10 years ago I changed my mind about the existence of a cosmological constant…. But I hadn’t really been committed one way or the other before the data came in and showed that it was positive. Does that really count as a change of mind? I don’t think so.
The answers I would give to this question are more political and personal than they are scientific, and are documented here: http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/blog/?p=24
Garth,
That logic could be extended to infinity. I could say that chairs are a logical device for sitting on, even if there were no chairs, or even people to sit in them. As an equation for preventing two legged creatures from falling on the ground, should they decide to rest, chairs are the most efficient method of keeping one’s butt suspended and back rested.
I think the question isn’t whether or not there are universal forms, but do they follow function, or does function follow form. Say your consciousness exists in a liquid, or fluid reality, where there is no set form and the very notion of individual objects is meaningless, since if you put any amount of such matter together, it would coalesce into one big blob. So if you added anything together, it would always equal one. In that world, if you separated out part of the blob, you’d have two separate blobs, so 1-1=2. Try explaining to this blob brain why 1-1=2 isn’t a universal truth.