Good wishes to all on the FW list. If you feel boredom coming on in the new year, you may wish to ponder some of the questions below. arthur cordell The New York Times News Service [<hr>]TUESDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1997[<hr>] In an On-Line Salon, Scientists Sit Back and Ponder AT his Web site, called Edge, John Brockman, a literary agent for many scientists and an author himself, tries to achieve what he calls ''electronic discourse at the highest level'' with people of ''the third culture'' -- scientists and other researchers who, he says, ''are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meaning of our lives, redefining who and what we are.'' To mark the first anniversary of the site (http://www.edge.org), Mr. Brockman posed a question: ''Simply reading the six million volumes in the Widener Library does not necessarily lead to a complex and subtle mind,'' he wrote, referring to the Harvard library. ''How to avoid the anesthesiology of wisdom?'' He answered the question with other questions -- by inviting participants to submit ''the question you are asking yourself.'' Here are some of their queries. They and others are now available at Edge. What is the crucial distinction between inanimate matter and an entity which can act as an ''agent,'' manipulating the world on its own behalf, and how does that change happen? -- PHILIP ANDERSON Physicist and Nobel laureate Princeton University Is the universe a great mechanism, a great computation, a great symmetry, a great accident or a great thought? -- JOHN D. BARROW Astronomer, University of Sussex How can we build a new ethics of respect for life that goes beyond individual survival to include the necessity of death, the preservation of the environment and our current and developing scientific knowledge? -- MARY CATHERINE BATESON Anthropologist, George Mason University How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? -- STEWART BRAND ''Whole Earth'' catalogues founder Which cognitive skills develop in any reasonably normal human environment and which only in specific sociocultural contexts? -- JOHN T. BRUER President, James S. McDonnell Foundation What is the mathematical essence that distinguishes living from nonliving, so that we can engineer a transcendence across the current boundaries? -- ROD BROOKS Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, M.I.T. Do humans have evolved homicide modules -- evolved psychological mechanisms specifically dedicated to killing other humans under certain contexts? -- DAVID BUSS Psychologist, University of Texas How will minds expand, once we understand how the brain makes mind? -- WILLIAM H. CALVIN Neurophysiologist, U. of Washington Any musically aware listener will know of music that breaks out of established forms or syntax to profound effect -- my personal favorites include Beethoven's ''Eroica Symphony,'' Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde,'' Schoenberg's ''Erwartung,'' Debussy's ''Apres Midi d'un Faune.'' What is the most that we can ever say objectively about what those composers are discovering? -- PHILIP CAMPBELL Editor, Nature If ethnicity and the human use of biological cues (and cultural and linguistic cues) to indicate social identity are parts of our evolutionary legacy, it makes it that much harder to eradicate ethnocentrism and racism. Can we do it? -- RACHEL CASPARI Anthropologist, University of Michigan If Gordon Moore was correct in his prediction that the amount of information storable on semiconductor chips would double every 18 months, over time is time more or less valuable? -- LUYEN CHOU President, Learn Technologies Interactive What is information and where does it ultimately originate? -- PAUL DAVIES Physicist, University of Adelaide, Australia What might a second specimen of the phenomenon that we call life look like? -- RICHARD DAWKINS Evolutionary biologist, Oxford A crowd can empty a football stadium in minutes, solving what is an intractable computational problem and exhibiting large-scale adaptive intelligence in the absence of central direction. Why are decentralized processes ubiquitous throughout nature and society -- evolution, itself, is such a process -- and why do people remain so distrustful of them that they will sacrifice their autonomy and freedom for centralized solutions? -- ARTHUR DE VANY Behavioral scientist, University of California at Irvine How on earth does the brain manage its division of labor problem -- that is, how do the quite specialized bits manage to contribute something useful when they get ''recruited'' by their neighbors to assist in currently dominant tasks? -- DANIEL C. DENNETT Philosopher, Tufts University What do collapses of past societies teach us about our own future? -- JARED DIAMOND Biologist, University of California at Los Angeles Medical School Throughout its history, the scientific community has shown great integrity in resisting the onslaught of antirationalism. How can it now be persuaded to show the same integrity in regard to scientism? -- DAVID DEUTSCH Physicist, Oxford Is psychic phenomenon just wishful thinking and can we ever prove it exists or doesn't exist using scientific methodology? -- JOHN C. DVORAK Columnist for PC Magazine, PC/ Computing and Boardwatch What makes a soul? And if machines ever have souls, what will be the equivalent of psychoactive drugs? Of pain? Of the physical/ emotional high I get from having a clean office? -- ESTHER DYSON President, Edventure Holdings; RELEASE 1.0 newsletter What goes on inside the head of a baby? FREEMAN DYSON Physicist, Institute for Advanced Study As biological and traditional forms of cultural evolution are superseded by electronic (or postelectronic) evolution, what will be the differentially propagating ''units'' and the outcome of the natural selection among them? -- PAUL EWALD Biologist, Amherst Will the ''theory of everything'' be a theory of principles, not particles? Will it invoke order from above, not below? -- KENNETH FORD Retired Director, American Institute of Physics However appropriate it may be for the economy, the ''market model'' is a grossly inadequate model for the rest of human society. With the decline of religious conviction and the slow pace of changes in the legal code, how can we nurture persons and institutions that can resist a purely market orientation in all spheres of living? -- HOWARD GARDNER Psychologist, Harvard How can we improve our reward system for excellence in filtering, interpreting and synthesizing the vast body of so-called information with which we are deluged? -- Murray Gell-Mann Nobel laureate in physics, Santa Fe Institute How do intelligent beings learn to adapt successfully on their own to a rapidly changing world without forgetting what they already know? -- STEPHEN GROSSBERG Cognitive scientist, Boston University How can we reconcile our desire for fairness and equity with the brutal fact that people are not all alike? -- JUDITH RICH HARRIS Developmental psychologist Is there a way to enlarge our separate tribal loyalties, to include all our fellow humans? -- REUBEN HERSH Mathematician Why is music such a pleasure? -- NICHOLAS HUMPHREY Psychologist, The New School What must a physical system be such that it can act on its own in an environment? -- STUART A. KAUFFMAN Biologist, Santa Fe Institute Are the laws of physics a logical coherent whole, so that with any small change the entire framework would crumble? Or are there a continuum of possibilities, only one of which happens to have been selected for our observed universe? -- LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS Physicist, Case Western Reserve University What does technology want? -- KEVIN KELLY Executive editor, Wired With the ever-growing dominance of corporate forms of control in everyday social life, how do we reconcile our notions of personal liberty and autonomy rooted in Enlightenment political thought? -- EDWARD O. LAUMANN Sociologist, University of Chicago For how long can Christianity and Islam survive the recovery of living organisms from beyond our planet by our species? Can religion exist after humans have created living entities that reproduce? -- RICHARD LEAKEY Paleoanthropologist; former director, Kenya Wildlife Service How can we know when and what we do not know? -- SIR JOHN MADDOX Editor emeritus, Nature How does the capacity for low mood give a selective advantage? -- RANDOLPH NESSE, M.D. Psychiatrist, University of Michigan Why are religions still vital? -- ELAINE H. PAGELS Professor of religion, Princeton How does the brain represent the meaning of a sentence? -- STEVEN PINKER Cognitive scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Is there a happiness gene, and is it dominant? -- LOUIS ROSSETTO Co-founder and publisher of Wired I often wonder -- sometimes despair -- whether it will be possible to solve long-term, global problems (global warming being my current focus) until we can overcome collective denial, which in turn, may not become conscious until we grapple with personal myths. I question whether the eventual loss of half the other species on earth will even be enough to overcome personal escapism that has gone collective. . . . Perhaps that's not even a question, but it occupies my mind a lot. -- STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER Climatologist, Stanford Do exotic life forms, made of very different materials than those used by life on earth, occur elsewhere in the universe? -- ROBERT SHAPIRO Biochemist, New York University Fundamentally, is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of moments? -- LEE SMOLIN Physicist, Penn State University Why are most individuals and all human societies grossly underachieving their potentials? -- DUNCAN STEEL Author What was the key factor in the success of Homo sapiens compared with other human species such as the Neanderthals? -- CHRIS STRINGER Research paleoanthropologist, The Natural History Museum, London Why not? -- LINDA STONE Director of the Virtual Worlds Group in the Microsoft Advanced Technology and Research Division A joint question: When posterity looks back on the 20th century from the perspective of a hundred years, what will they see as our greatest successes and worst follies? -- PAMELA McCORDUCK Author JOSEPH TRAUB Computer scientist, Columbia Can we devise a religion for the 21st century and beyond that is plausible and yet avoids banality -- one that people see the need for? What would it be like? -- COLIN TUDGE Author Is the phenomenology of modern biology converging on a small number of basic truths or will it increasingly diverge, becoming so endlessly complex that no single human mind will be able to encompass it? -- ROBERT A. WEINBERG, M.D. Biologist, M.I.T.; Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research What do we want from science? -- MARGARET WERTHEIM Science writer Copyright 1997 The New York Times / The New York Times News Service via Dow Jones & Company * * * END OF DOCUMENT * * *
