I have described Cognitive Science as an initial step towards construction of an interdisciplinary science of mind. Another recent effort towards interdiciplinary cooperation within science is the development of a new Science of Complex Systems. Murray Gell-Mann has been a mojor force in the development of this interdisciplinary effort.

"The Sante Fe Institute, which I helped to found in 1984, gathers together mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, chemists, neurobiologists, immunologists,  evolutionary biologists, ecologists, archaeologists, linguists,  economists, political scientists, and historians, among others. The emphasis is on interactive people. Many distinguished scientists and scholars yearn to stray outside their own fields but can't do so easily at their own institutions. We didn't want to locate our institute near Harvard or Stanford, where there's enormous pressure of received ideas - ideas accepted by a whole community and therefore difficult to challenge. In Sante Fe, we can think and talk freely, constrained only by  the need to agree with reality." 

While I agree with the idea of escaping from useless centers of intellectual inertia, it is ironic that efforts towards such "escape" so often look like early rocket launches: some blow up on the pad, some go off course, and all others do not have the needed power to reach escape velocity.....eventually they simply reverse course and become their own new center of conventional thinking. I fear that any conventional institution that gets involved in the competition for $$$ will evolve along similar lines. Western philosophy and science were born in Ionian Greece in an atmosphere where itinerant philosophers were free to think as they wanted, with few constraints from patrons, priests, and other thought police. The internet must become the medium within which free thought can flower in the electronic age. In Classical Greece, the new Greek alphabet and the written word was the medium that allowed distant (in time and space) intellectuals to exist in a type of "virtual community" of shared ideas. The internet can do the same thing for us.

Like Gell-Mann (who has interests in ecosystem conservation) I am also interested in good relations beteen science and society at large. For early philosophy the sad reality was that the "medium of philosophical discourse" was very expensive and rare. Most people could not read. Books were few in number and not widely available. Also, most of the subject matter of philosophy was not relevant to the public at large. Did it matter to a farmer if there were atoms or Ideal Forms? No. Things are very different now. Things changed when Europe came out of its dark age and the universities arose as places where intellectuals could build ideas. After several centuries of such intellectual freedom, modern life depends on the practical fruits of science. Philosophical disputes about things like the nature of life and mind ARE relevant to people's lives. Rather than facing a shortage of books, we are now having to find ways of dealing with how to find what we are interested in within the flood of information available by way of the internet.

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

The struggle continues.

Nice web site for explorations of new ways of bringing together science and society at large.

When I was in high school, other kids wanted a cool stereo system, but I wanted a personal computer. Other kids were fans of rock stars, I read Byte magazine and dreamed of a global village and linked computers. I wrote a paper for an English class in which I explained how computers would eventually put conventional schools and teaching out of business. This was back in the 1970's and my English teacher and everyone else thought I was nuts. Of course, I was not talking about the end of education as we knew it by the middle of next year. These things take time. Social change is so slow that most people cannot even see it. Roger Shank was one of the people who was important in deflecting me out of the "mind as computer" metaphore that was engulfing the academic world back in the 70's. It is nice to see that he still has his head screwed on right and is talking sensibly about computers and education. What should the "Virtual University" of the internet be able to do? There have always been a few people who are interested in the task of collecting, nurturing, unifying, and passing along cultural knowledge. The internet will allow these rare individuals, the synthesizers, the curators of knowledge, to come into "virtual contact" with the eager students who despirately want access to their cultural heritage. The brick universities will continue to exist as places where governments and companies fund mult-million dollar research labs and discovery continues at the edge of the unknown. But the internet will become a new type of university into which all of the minutia of the brick universities pour, a "place" where ideas can be assembled, transmitted, and translated into a form that can become part of society at large.