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?”
John
It is – in Modulo 2 arithmetic.
Garth
As opposed to 1/(1/2) = 2, which is both a better representation of the system and actually true?
Garth,
An interesting article in this week’s NewScientist;
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19726373.300-is-there-a-language-problem-with-quantum-physics.html;jsessionid=HDLFPHEOAOKH
That didn’t quote right. The last three parts were my own.
Bob,
It depends on whether it’s sets or quantities. If you actually add two sets together, you’ve got one larger set, so 1+1=1. Now from the perspective of the blob brain, it might view itself as a set, like a cell, so there isn’t .5 of a set, just a smaller set and when it divides, 1 becomes two.
It’s not that one is right and one is wrong, but that different perspectives can view the same situation from different perspectives and we are oriented toward a particular frame of reference that becomes self re-enforcing. Sort of like people need to speak the same language, or drive on the same side of the road for society to function.
The point being that there is a logical structure in mathematics, which can take on many forms, but is ‘true’ in an abstract sense in that it is internally consistent.
The structure reveals a hidden truth, such as when the same result proves true both by two different methods as for example algebra and geometry. This mental process often reflects structure in nature, so much so that some think it is the ultimate physical reality, (which I don’t), and allows theorists to explore a reality of ‘the world out there’ scribbling “on the backs of old envelopes”.
It is this objective correlation with physical reality that gives me the deep impression that mathematical truth ‘exists’ in a Platonic way beyond the mental processes of the human mind.
Garth
Garth,
I certainly agree that order exists independent of the human mind and have no problem with different approaches yielding the same patterns. The point is whether the patterns are a consequence of process, or the reason process yields repeatable results.
I used to believe the universe was closed. Now I am not so sure.
I still believe in causality and that time only flows one way.
e.
“I still believe in causality and that time only flows one way.”
yaw eno swolf ylno emit taht dna ytilasuac ni eveileb llist I
“llist” being a quantum fluctuation
Elliot,
But which way?
If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future, then in the past. To the hands of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise, just as the sun appears to go from east to west, when the reality is the earth rotates west to east.
So which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the events created go from being future potential to past circumstance.
This isn’t presentism, because the only absolute time would be the absence of any motion, just as the only absolute temperature is absolute zero and every clock is effectively its own dimension of time.
John,
Your descriptions are clever but to my mind misleading. I believe time goes from the past to the future only and that the flow in this direction is fundamental. Are there relative measures of the flow to be taken into account? Yes but the direction cannot be reversed. Just because a train going west at 100 mph passes another train going west at 80 mph does not mean the slower train is going east although it might appear so to an observer on the faster train.
Elliot
Elliot,
The arrow of time goes from what comes first, to what comes second. As observers, we witness past events(cause) prior to succeeding events(effect), so the arrow of time for the observer is past to future. On the other hand, these events are first in the future, such as the 9th of January, 2008 is currently tomorrow. Then they are in the past, as tomorrow will be in two days. So the arrow of time for events is future to past.
To a certain extent, our understanding of time is a cultural artifact. There are native peoples in South America who view the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. The logic of this is that their point of reference, the hands of their mental clock, is the energy, not the observer. Since it records the observed event first, then transmits the information to the observer, their conceptual arrow of time is front to back, not forward.
John,
Agreed regarding ordering of events. And I do think that the nature (and direction) of time is tightly bound to information flow. How this may be quantified is quite interesting.
e.
Elliot,
Energy goes past to future. Information goes future to past. Think about the atoms vs. the event. Our brains, as material reality, are the energy going from past to future, while our minds, as the record of the events created, go from future potential to past circumstance. That’s why ‘We live life forward and see it backward.’
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