Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.
And that is why I further believe that we should:
To believe without knowing it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics. Guys like Einstein, Dirac, Poincaré, etc. extolled the beauty of concepts, in a bizarre sense, placing truth at a lower level of importance.
1. There is no God, intelligent designer, or anything resembling the divinity as proffered by the world's religions.
. . a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!),
. . b) assess others' ideas with open-minded skepticism, and
. . c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.
. . Within psychology, this "ever-reforming" process has many times changed my mind, leading me now to believe, for example, that newborns are not so dumb, that electro convulsive therapy often alleviates intractable depression, that America's economic growth has not improved our morale, that the automatic unconscious mind dwarfs the conscious mind, that traumatic experiences rarely get repressed, that most folks don't suffer low self-esteem, and that sexual orientation is not a choice.
. . I think modern life has fundamentally and paradoxically changed our sense of time. Even as we live longer, we seem to think shorter. Is it because we cram more into each hour? Or because the next person over seems to cram more into each hour? For a variety of reasons, everything is happening much faster and more things are happening. Change is a constant.
. . Today's children are living in an information-rich, time-compressed environment that often seems to replace a child's imagination rather than stimulate it.
. . True love.
. . I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.
. . While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it.
. . I believe nothing to be true (clearly real) if it cannot be proved.
. . I'll take the question and make a pseudo-invariant transformation that makes it more apt to my brain. When Bohr was asked what is the complementary variable of "truth" (Wirklichkeit) he replied with no hesitation "clarity" (Klarheit). Contrary to Bohr, and since neither truth nor clarity are quantum mechanical variables, real truth and comprehensive clarity should be simultaneously achievable given rigorous experimental evidence.
. . that belief and proof are in some way complementary: if you believe, you don't need proof; and (arguably) if you have proof, you don't need to believe.
. . My hunch (and wish) is that in the laboratory, we will be able to segment spacetime so finely that gravity will be studied and understood in a controlled environment, and that gravitational particle physics will be a new field.
. . Life is ubiquitous throughout the universe. Life on our planet earth most likely is the result of a panspermic event.
. . DNA, RNA and carbon based life will be found wherever we find water and look with the right tools.
. . I believe that life is common throughout the universe and that we will find another Earth-like planet within a decade. The mathematics alone ought to be proof to most people.
. . everything life needs is out there. For it not to come together somewhere else as it did on earth is remarkably unlikely. In fact, although there are Goldilocks zones in galaxies where life as we know it is most likely to survive.
. . I am not interested in ideas that cannot in principle be proven or disproven. I am as capable as the next guy in believing in an idea that is not yet proven so long as it could in principle be proven or disproven.
. . In my chosen field of autism, I believe that the cause will turn out to be assortative mating of two hyper-systemizers. I believe this because we already have 3 pieces of the jig-saw: (1) that fathers of children with autism are more likely to work in the field of engineering (compared to fathers of children without autism); (2) that grandfathers of children with autism -—on both sides of the family—- were also more likely to work in the field of engineering (compared to grandfathers of children without autism); and (3) that both mothers and fathers of children with autism are super-fast at the embedded figures test, a task requiring analysis of patterns and rules.
. . I believe that the radiation emitted by mobile phones is harmless.
. . My argument is not based so much on the scientific evidence -—because there isn't very much of it, and what little there is has either found no effect or is statistically dubious. Instead, it is based on a historical analogy with previous scares about overhead power lines and cathode-ray computer monitors (VDUs). Both were also thought to be dangerous, yet years of research—decades in the case of power lines—failed to find conclusive evidence of harm.
. . The underlying problem, of course, is the impossibility of proving a negative.
. . My friend, the theoretical physicist, believed so strongly in String Theory, "It must be true!" He was called to testify in a lawsuit, which contested the claims of String Theory against Quantum Loop Gravity. The lawyer was skeptical. "What makes you such an authority?" he asked. "Oh, I am without question the world's most outstanding theoretical physicist", was the startling reply. It was enough to convince the lawyer to change the subject. However, when the witness came off the stand, he was surrounded by protesting colleagues.
. . "How could you make such an outrageous claim?" they asked. The theoretical physicist defended, "Fellows, you just don't understand; I was under oath."
. . I believe, but cannot prove...that reality exists over and above human and social constructions of that reality. Science as a method, and naturalism as a philosophy, together form the best tool we have for understanding that reality. Because science is cumulative -—that is, it builds on itself in a progressive fashion—- we can strive to achieve an ever-greater understanding of reality. Our knowledge of nature remains provisional because we can never know if we have final Truth. Because science is a human activity and nature is complex and dynamic, fuzzy logic and fractional probabilities best describe both nature and the estimations of our approximation toward understanding that nature.
. . There is no such thing as the paranormal and the supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural and mysteries we have yet to explain.
. . 2. The universe is ultimately determined, but we have free will. Since no set of causes we select as the determiners of human action can be complete, the feeling of freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes. To that extent, we may act as if we are free.
. . 3. Morality is the natural outcome of evolutionary and historical forces, not divine command.
. . Of course, I could be wrong...
. . I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory.
. . there is no fixed background, such as Newtonian space and time, which exists just to give things properties.
. . I also doubt that the "big bang" is the beginning of time, I strongly suspect that our history extends backwards before the big bang.
. . I believe that scientists will soon understand the physiological basis of the "cognitive spectrum", from the bright violet of tightly-focused analytic thought all the way down to the long, slow red of low-focus sleep thought -—also known as "dreaming." Once they understand the spectrum, they'll know how to treat insomnia, will understand analogy-discovery (and therefore creativity), and the role of emotion in thought—and will understand that thought takes place not only when you solve a math problem but when you look out the window and let your mind wander.
. . scientists will understand why we can't force ourselves to fall asleep or to "be creative" --and how those two facts are related. They'll understand why so many people report being most creative while driving, shaving or doing some other activity that keeps the mind's foreground occupied and lets it approach open problems in a "low focus" way.
. . Here's what we suspect about the cognitive spectrum: as you move down-spectrum, as your thinking grows less analytic and more concrete and finally bottoms on the wholly non-logical, highly concrete type of thought we call dreaming, emotions function increasingly as the "glue" of thought.
. . I believe neuroscientists will never have enough understanding of the neural code, the secret language of the brain, to read peoples' thoughts without their consent.
. . humans beings alone however have discovered the advantages of off-loading much of the responsibility for managing their sickness behaviors to other people; the result is that for human beings the very nature of illness has changed—human illness is now largely a social phenomenon.
. . I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
. . Tribal Mind. . . . What would it be like to be part of a distributed intelligence but still with an individual consciousness? Well for starters, you might expect to see the collective mind 'take over' from time to time, directly guiding the individual minds. In humans, the behavior of angry mobs and frightened crowds seem to qualify as examples of a 'collective mind' in action, with non-linguistic channels of communication usurping the individual capacity for rational behavior.
. . Analogous with the wiggle dance of the honeybee, there ought to be non-linguistic signals that accurately predict important behavioral outcomes.
. . we have found that we can use these measurements of social signaling to automatically predict a wide range of important behavioral outcomes --objective, instrumental, and subjective-- with high accuracy, accounting for between 30% and 80% of the total outcome variance.
. . So here is what I suspect but can not prove: a very large proportion of our behavior is determined by largely unconscious social signaling, which sets the context, risk, and reward structure within which traditional cognitive processes proceed.
. . My career has been guided by just the sort of unproven guess this year's question seeks.
. . My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use.
. . the means to survival is to create societies with a huge variety of paths to success and a multitude of overlapping, intertwined clans and pecking orders, so that everyone can be a winner from equally valid individual perspectives. When the American experiment has worked best, it has approximated this level of variety. The virtual worlds of post-symbolic communication can provide the highest level of variety to satisfy the dangerous psychic inheritance I'm guessing we suffer as a species.
. . Is there a fourth law of thermodynamics, or some cousin of it, concerning self constructing non equilibrium systems such as biospheres anywhere in the cosmos? I like to think there may be such a law.
. . Consider this: the number of possible proteins 200 amino acids long is 20 raised to the 200th power or about 10 raised to the 260th power. Now, the number of particles in the known universe is about 10 to the 80th power. Suppose, on a microsecond time scale the universe were doing nothing other than producing proteins length 200. It turns out that it would take vastly many repeats of the history of the universe to create all possible proteins length 200.
. . Before life, there were perhaps a few hundred organic molecule species on the earth. Now there are perhaps a trillion or more.
. . My hoped for law is that biospheres everywhere in the universe expand in such a way that they do so as fast as is possible while maintaining the rough diversity of what already exists. Otherwise stated, the diversity of things that can happen next increases on average as fast as it can.
. . I believe it is true that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, of whatever form, it will be familiar with the same concept of counting numbers.
. . There is no God that has existence apart from people's thoughts of God. There is certainly no Being that can simply suspend the (nomological) laws of the universe in order to satisfy our personal or collective yearnings and whims --like a stage director called on to change and improve a play. But there is a mental (cognitive and emotional) process common to science and religion of suspending belief in what you see and take for obvious fact. Humans have a mental compulsion --perhaps a by-product of the evolution of a hyper-sensitive reasoning device to serve our passions-- to situate and understand the present state of mundane affairs within an indefinitely extendable and overarching system of relations between hitherto unconnected elements. In any event, what drives humanity forward in history is this quest for non-apparent truth.
. . I believe, but can't prove, that human language evolved from a combination of gesture and innate vocalizations, via the concomitant evolution of mirror neurons, and that birds will provide the best model for language evolution.
. . What can be called the mirror neuron hypothesis(MNH) suggests that only a small re-organization of the nonhuman primate brain was needed to create the wiring that underlies speech acquisition/learning.
. . Passerine birds can be divided into two groups: the oscines, who learn their songs, and the sub-oscines, who have a limited number of what seem to be innately-specified songs.
. . We are good at fitting explanations to the past, all the while living in the illusion of understanding the dynamics of history.
. . My claim is about the severe overestimation of knowledge in what I call the "ex post" historical disciplines, meaning almost all of social science (economics, sociology, political science) and the humanities, everything that depends on the non-experimental analysis of past data. I am convinced that these disciplines do not provide much understanding of the world or even their own subject matter; they mostly fit a nice sounding narrative that caters to our desire (even need) to have a story. The implications are quite against conventional wisdom. You do not gain much by reading the newspapers, history books, analyses and economic reports; all you get is misplaced confidence about what you know. The difference between a cab driver and a history professor is only cosmetic as the latter can express himself in a better way.
. . It was said: "the wise see things coming". To me, the wise persons are the ones who know that they can't see things coming.
. . I always felt, but can't prove outright: Zen is wrong. "Then" is right. Everything is not about the now, as in the "here and how", "living for the moment" On the contrary: I believe everything is about the before then and the back then. It is about the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment, but not the moment.
. . In German, there is a beautiful little word for it: "Vorfreude", which still is a shade different from "delight" or "pleasure" or even "anticipation". It is the "Pre-Delight", the "Before-Joy". It is not the real moment that matters. In Anticipation the moment will be glorified by innocence, not knowing yet. In Remembrance the moment will be sanctified by memory filters, not knowing any more.
. . Make plans and take pictures.
I believe, first, that all people have the same fundamental concepts, values, concerns, and commitments, despite our diverse languages, religions, social practices, and expressed beliefs. Our common conceptual and moral commitments spring from the core cognitive systems that allow an infant to grow rapidly and spontaneously into a competent participant in any human society.
. . Second, one of our shared core systems centers on a notion that is false: the notion that members of different human groups differ profoundly in their concepts and values.
. . Third, the most striking feature of human cognition stems not from our core knowledge systems but from our capacity to rise above them.
. . Together, my three beliefs suggest a fourth. If the cognitive sciences are given sufficient time, the truth of the claim of a common human nature eventually will be supported by evidence as strong and convincing as the evidence that the earth is round.
. . But this fourth belief is conditional. Our species is caught in a race between the progress of our science and the escalation both of our intergroup conflicts and of the destructive means to pursue them. Will humans last long enough for our science to win this race?
. . What I believe, though cannot yet prove, is that belief is a content-independent process. Which is to say that beliefs about God --to the degree that they are really believed-- are the same as beliefs about numbers, penguins, tofu, or anything else.
. . I do believe, however, is that the neural processes that govern the final acceptance of a statement as "true" rely on more fundamental, reward-related circuitry in our frontal lobes --probably the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense. And false statements may, quite literally, disgust us.
. . Understanding belief at the level of the brain may hold the key to new insights into the nature of our minds, to new rules of discourse, and to new frontiers of human cooperation.
. . That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. That is, we, like all other mammals including our apish brothers detect odors, distinguish tastes, hear bird song and drum beats and we too feel the vibrations of the drums. With our eyes closed we detect the light of the rising sun. These abilities to sense our surroundings are a heritage that preceded the evolution of all primates, all vertebrate animals, indeed all animals.
. . These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections ("cell processes") called cilia. Cilia have a recognizable fine structure. With a very high power ("electron") microscope a precise array of protein tubules, nine, exactly nine pairs of tubules are arranged in a circular array and two singlet tubules are in the center of this array. All sensory cells have this common feature, whether in the light-sensitive retina of the eye or the balance-sensitive semicircular canals of the inner ear. Cross-section slices of the tails of human, mouse and even insect (fruit-fly) sperm all share this same instantly recognizable structure too. Why this peculiar pattern? No one knows for sure but it provides the evolutionist with a strong argument for common ancestry. The size (diameter) of the circle (0.25 micrometers) and of the constituent tubules (0.024 micrometers) aligned in the circle is identical in the touch receptors of the human finger and the taste buds of the elephant.
. . Even though the concept that cilia evolved from spirochetes has not been proved I think it is true. Not only is it true but, given the powerful new techniques of molecular biology I think the hypothesis will be conclusively proved. In the not-too-distant future people will wonder why so many scientists were so against my idea for so long!
. . ... that three --not two-- selection processes were involved in human evolution.
. . The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness.
. . The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty --not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.
. . that I believe played an important role in human evolution: the abandonment of newborns that arrived at inopportune times (this practice has been documented in many human societies by anthropologists), and the use of aesthetic criteria to tip the scales in doubtful cases.
. . Coupled with sexual selection, parental selection could have produced certain kinds of evolutionary changes very quickly, even if the heartbreaking decision of whether to rear or abandon a newborn was made in only a small percentage of births.
. . I believe (though I cannot prove it) that the transition to hairlessness took place quickly, over a short evolutionary time period, and involved only Homo sapiens or its immediate precursor. It was a cultural thing. Our ancestors thought of themselves as "people" and thought of fur-bearing creatures as "animals", just as we do. A baby born too hairy would have been distinctly less appealing to its parents.
. . I believe, though I cannot prove it, that Neandertals were covered with a heavy coat of fur, and that Homo erectus, their ancestor, was as hairy as the modern chimpanzee. In [Cro-Magnon's] view, anything with fur on it could be classified as "animal" --or, to put it more bluntly, game. Neandertal disappeared in Europe for the same reason the woolly mammoth disappeared there: the ancestors of the modern Europeans ate them.
. . the glaciers are melting. Someday a hiker may come across the well-preserved corpse of a furry Neandertal.
. . I can sum my intuition up in five words: we're in for climatic mayhem.
. . Einstein said "You must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real". An apt longer quote of his is: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality".
. . So, science is a relationship between what we can represent and are able to think about, and "what's out there": it's an extension of good map making, most often using various forms of mathematics as the mapping languages. When we guess in science we are guessing about approximations and mappings to languages, we are not guessing about "the truth".
. . A good Don Knuth quote is: "Beware of bugs in the above [computer] code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
. . Irrational choices.
. . I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe that are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made --who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.
. . Decisions are made for us by our unconscious, the conscious is in charge of making up reasons for those decisions which sound rational. We can, on the other hand, think rationally about the choices that other people make.
. . Their presence is noted indirectly in the Universe's expansion. However, though they are presumably by far the most numerous type of material particle in existence, not a single one of those primordial neutrinos has ever been detected. In the 1950s, neutrinos were detected in nuclear reactors.
. . Science, like most human activities, is based on a belief, namely the assumption that nature is understandable.
. . If we are faced with a puzzling experimental result, we first try harder to understand it with currently available theory, using more clever ways to apply that theory. If that really doesn't work, we try to improve or perhaps even replace the theory. We never conclude that a not-yet understood result is in principle un-understandable.
. . as a scientist, I strongly believe that Nature is understandable. And such a belief can neither be proved nor disproved.
. . quantum mechanics tells us that repeating the same experiment will give different results. The discovery of quantum mechanics led us to relax the rigid requirement of a deterministic objective reality to a statistical agreement with a not fully determinable reality. Although at first sight, such a restriction might seem to limit our understanding, we in fact have gained a far deeper understanding of matter through the use of quantum mechanics than we could possibly have obtained using only classical mechanics.
. . If our thoughts and consciousness do not depend on the actual substances in our brains but rather on the structures, patterns, and relationships between parts, then Tinkertoy minds could think. If you could make a copy of your brain with the same structure but using different materials, the copy would think it was you.
. . It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. As Samuel Johnson said "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it." With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.
. . But what happens? People say I'm lying! They say it's impossible and so I must be deluding myself to preserve my theory. And what can I do or say to challenge them? I have no idea --other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is.
. . It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds --but this too I cannot prove.
. . As for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether --this is very much harder. I just keep on seeming to exist. But though I cannot prove it --I think it is true that I don't.
. . Before we can answer this question, we need to agree what we mean by proof. (This is one of the reasons why its good to have mathematicians around. We like to begin by giving precise definitions of what we are going to talk about, a pedantic tendency that sometimes drives our physicist and engineering colleagues crazy.) For instance, following Descartes, I can prove to myself that I exist, but I can't prove it to anyone else. Even to those who know me well there is always the possibility, however remote, that I am merely a figment of their imagination. If it's rock solid certainty you want from a proof, there's almost nothing beyond our own existence (whatever that means and whatever we exist as) that we can prove to ourselves, and nothing at all we can prove to anyone else.
. . Others will accept or reject what we say depending on how much credence they give us as a scientist, philosopher, or whatever, generally basing that decision on our scientific reputation and record of previous work.
. . a statement of my belief that arithmetic is free of internal contradictions) is no longer available. GÒdel's theorem showed that you cannot prove an axiomatically based theory like arithmetic is free of contradiction within that theory itself. But that doesn't mean you can't prove it in some larger, richer theory. In fact, in the standard axiomatic set theory, you can prove arithmetic is free of contradictions. And personally, I buy that proof. For me, as a living, human mathematician, the consistency of arithmetic has been proved --to my complete satisfaction.
. . If I were to flip a coin a million times, I'd be damn sure I wasn't going to get all heads. I'm not a betting man but I'd be so sure that I'd bet my life or my soul. I'd even go the whole way and bet a year's salary. I'm absolutely certain the laws of large numbers --probability theory-- will work and protect me. All of science is based on it. But, I can't prove it and I don't really know why it works.
. . Well, of course, it is tempting to go for something like, "That the wheel, agriculture, and the Macarena were all actually invented by yetis." Or to do the sophomoric pseudo-ironic logic twist of, "That every truth can eventually be proven." Or to get up my hackles, draw up to my full height and intone, "Sir, we scientists believe in nothing that cannot be proven by the whetstone of science, verily our faith is our lack of faith", and then go off in a lab coat and a huff.
. . So mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word).
. . What good would religiosity be if it came with a transparently clear contract, instead of requiring the leap of faith into an unknowable void?
. . Finally, just to undo any semblance of logic here, I might even continue to believe there is no god, even if it was proven that there is one. A religious friend of mine once said to me that the concept of god is very useful, so that you can berate god during the bad times. But it is clear to me that I don't need to believe that there is a god in order to berate him.
. . Since I am a mathematician, I give a precise answer to this question. Thanks to Kurt Gödel, we know that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proved.
. . Numbers that are exact powers of two are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on. Numbers that are exact powers of five are 5, 25, 125, 625 and so on. Given any number such as 131072 (which happens to be a power of two), the reverse of it is 270131, with the same digits taken in the opposite order. Now my statement is: it never happens that the reverse of a power of two is a power of five.
. . Most languages are much, much more complicated than they need to be.
. . But here were a few languages that had no prefixes or suffixes at all. Nor do they have any tones, like many languages in the world. For one thing, languages that have been around forever that have no prefixes, suffixes, or tones are very rare worldwide.
. . So isn't it interesting that the island these languages is spoken on is none other than Flores, which has had its fifteen minutes of fame this year as the site where skeletons of the "little people" were found. Anthropologists have hypothesized that this was a different species of Homo. While the skeletons date back 13,000 years ago or more, local legend recalls "little people" living alongside modern humans, ones who had some kind of language of their own and could "repeat back" in modern humans' language. The legends suggest that the little people only had primitive language abilities, but we can't be sure here.
. . Now, I can only venture this highly tentatively now. But what I "know" but cannot prove this year is: the reason languages like Keo and Ngada are so strangely streamlined on Flores is that an earlier ancestor of these languages, just as complex as its family members tend to be, was used as second language by these other people and simplified.
. . Specifically, I would hypothesize that the little people were gradually incorporated into modern human society over time --perhaps subordinated in some way-- such that modern human children were hearing the little people's rendition of the language as much as a native one.
. . Much has been made over the parallels between the evolution of languages and the evolution of animals and plants. However, I believe that one important difference is that while animals and plants can evolve towards simplicity as well as complexity depending on conditions, languages do not evolve towards simplicity in any significant, overall sense—unless there is some sociohistorical factor that puts a spoke in the wheel.
. . The "rotten-to-the-core" assumption about human nature espoused so widely in the social sciences and the humanities is wrong. This premise has its origins in the religious dogma of original sin and was dragged into the secular twentieth century by Freud, reinforced by two world wars, the Great Depression, the cold war, and genocides too numerous to list. The premise holds that virtue, nobility, meaning, and positive human motivation generally are reducible to, parasitic upon, and compensations for what is really authentic about human nature: selfishness, greed, indifference, corruption and savagery. The only reason that I am sitting in front of this computer typing away rather than running out to rape and kill is that I am "compensated", zipped up, and successfully defending myself against these fundamental underlying impulses.
. . In spite of its widespread acceptance in the religious and academic world, there is not a shred of evidence, not an iota of data, which compels us to believe that nobility and virtue are somehow derived from negative motivation. On the contrary, I believe that evolution has favored both positive and negative traits, and many niches have selected for morality, co-operation, altruism, and goodness, just as many have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism.
. . I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces.
. . I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris. Every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide and seek is Einstein in 1905.
. . I believe that the problem of capital-C Consciousness will disappear in psychology just as the problem of Life disappeared in biology.
. . The vividness and intensity of our attentive awareness, for example, may be completely divorced from our experience of a constant first-person I.
. . In 1974, Marvin Minsky wrote that "there is room in the anatomy and genetics of the brain for much more mechanism than anyone today is prepared to propose."
. . At the level of genetics, critics have pointed to the small number of genes in the human genome (now thought to be less than 25,000) and to their similarity to those of other animals. I believe that geneticists will find that there is a large store of information in the noncoding regions of the genome (the so-called junk DNA), whose size, spacing, and composition could have large effects on how genes are expressed. That is, the genes themselves may code largely for the meat and juices of the organism, which are pretty much the same across species, whereas how they are sculpted into brain circuits may depend on a much larger body of genetic information. I also believe that many examples of what we call "the same genes" in different species may differ in tiny ways at the sequence level that have large consequences for how the organism is put together.
. . that many genes involved in cognition and emotion were specifically selected for in the primate, and in many cases the human, lineage.
. . I believe there is an external reality and you are not all figments of my imagination. My friend asks me through the steam he blows off the surface of his coffee, how I can trust the laws of physics back to the origins of the universe. I ask him how he can trust the laws of physics down to his cup of coffee. He shows every confidence that the scalding liquid will not spontaneously defy gravity and fly up in his eyes.
. . I simultaneously believe more and less than he does. It is rational to believe what all of my empirical and logical tests of the world confirm—that there is a reality that exists independent of me. That the coffee will not fly upwards. But it is a belief nonetheless. Once I've gone that far, why stop at the perimeter of mundane experience? Just as we can test the temperature of a hot beverage with a tongue, or a thermometer, we can test the temperature of the primordial light left over from the big bang. One is no less real than the other simply because it is remarkable.
. . But how do I really know? If I measure the temperature of boiling water, all I really know is that mercury climbs a glass tube. Not even that, all I really know is that I see mercury climb a glass tube.
. . But this solopsism is ugly and arrogant.
. . But if I am wrong and there is no external reality, then not only is this essay my invention, but so is the web, edge.org, all of its participants and their ingenious ideas. And if you are reading this, I have created you too. But if I am wrong and there is no external reality, then maybe it is me who is a figment of your imagination and the cosmos outside your door is your magnificent creation.
. . The Atom, the nucleus and the proton, each in its own time, were considered elementary and indivisible, only to be replaced later by smaller objects as the fundamental building blocks. How can we be so arrogant as to exclude the possibility that this will happen again? Why would nature arbitrarily produce 12 different objects, with a very orderly pattern of electric charges and "color forces", with simple charge ratios between seemingly unrelated particles (such as the electron and the quark) and with a pattern of masses, which appears to be taken from the results of a lottery? Doesn't this "smell" again of further sub-particle structure?
. . Based on common sense and on an observation of the pattern of the known particles, without any experimental evidence and without any comprehensive theory, I have believed for many years, and I continue to believe, that the electron, the neutrino and the quarks are divisible. They are presumably made of different combinations of the same small number (two?) of more fundamental sub-particles. The latter may or may not have the string structure, and may or may not be themselves composites.
. . I don't believe that life is a freak event. I think the universe is teeming with it. I can't prove it; indeed, it could be that mankind will never know the answer for sure. If we find life in our solar system, it most likely got there from Earth (or vice versa) in rocks kicked off planets by comet impacts.
. . I believe we are not alone because life seems to be a fundamental, and not merely an incidental, property of nature. It is built into the great cosmic scheme at the deepest level, and therefore likely to be pervasive.
. . I believe, but cannot prove, that the DNA in your body (and all bodies) varies from part to part. I make this prediction based on what we know about biology, which is that natures abhors uniformity. No where else in nature do we see identity maintained to such exactness. No where else is there such fixity.
. . I believe that once we have a constant reading of our individual full DNA (many times over our lives) we will have no end of surprises. I would not be surprised to discover that pet owners accumulate some tiny fragments of their pet's DNA,which has somehow been laterally transferred via viruses to their own cellular DNA.
. . Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be?
. . My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.
. . Mental processes: An out-of-body existence?
. . These days, it seems obvious that the mind arises from the b rain (not the heart, liver, or some other organ). In fact, I personally have gone so far as to claim that "the mind is what the brain does." But this notion does not preclude an unconventional idea: Your mind may arise not simply from your own brain, but in part from the brains of other people.
. . three key observations:
. . The first is that our brains are limited, and so we use crutches to supplement and extend our abilities.
. . The second observation is that the major prosthetic system we use is other people. We set up what I call "Social Prosthetic Systems" (SPSs), in which we rely on others to extend our reasoning abilities.
. . The third observation is that a key element of serving as a SPS is learning how best to help someone.
. . By becoming your SPS, a person literally lends you part of his or her brain!
. . In short, parts of other people's brains come to serve as extensions of your own brain. And if the mind is "what the brain does", then your mind in fact arises from the activity of not only your own brain, but those of your SPSs.
. . In fact, one could even argue that when your body dies, part of your mind may survive. But before getting into such dark and dusty corners, it would be nice to have firm footing --to collect evidence that these speculations are in fact worth taking seriously.
. . For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I, nor anyone else, has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals.
. . I think it is hard to know what consciousness might be like in another animal. If we can't measure it (because it is internal and subjective) and can't use our own experience to frame questions about it (because the hardware that makes it possible is different), it becomes difficult to study.
. . I think rats and other mammals, and maybe even roaches (who knows?), have feelings.
. . The enterprise that employs me, seeking to understand and apply insight into how the world works, is ultimately based on the belief that this is a good thing to do. But it's something of a leap of faith to believe that that will leave the world a better place --the evidence to date is mixed for technical advances monotonically mapping onto human advances.
. . like the accumulated experience that democracy works better than monarchy, I have more faith in a future based on widespread access to the means for invention than one based on technocracy.
. . I believe our universe is not unique. As science has evolved, our place within the universe has continued to diminish in significance.
. . I find it satisfying to think that it is likely that not only are we not located in a particularly special place in our universe, but that our universe itself may be relatively insignificant on a larger cosmic scale. It represents perhaps the ultimate Copernican Revolution.
. . Dan Dennett has it right in his comments below when he puts the emphasis on acquiring language, not having language, as a precondition for our kind of consciousness. For what it's worth, I have some (likely unproveable) beliefs about why the preschooler's acquisition of a structured language is so important for all the rest of her higher intellectual function.
. . I like the emphasis on acquiring language as a precondition for consciousness: tuning up to sentence structure might make the child better able to perform at nonlanguage tasks which also need some structuring. Improve one, improve them all?
. . Is that what boosts our cleverness and intelligence? Is "our kind of consciousness" nothing but structured intellect with good quality control? Can't prove it, but it sure looks like a good candidate.
. . I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness–in the strong sense of there being a subject, an I, a 'something it is like something to be.' It would follow that non-human animals and pre-linguistic children, although they can be sensitive, alert, responsive to pain and suffering, and cognitively competent in many remarkable ways–including ways that exceed normal adult human competence–are not really conscious (in this strong sense): there is no organized subject (yet) to be the enjoyer or sufferer, no owner of the experiences as contrasted with a mere cerebral locus of effects.
. . Interspecies coevolution of languages on the Northwest Coast.
. . During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic "tok" and "tlik."
. . I believe this correspondence between human language and raven language is more than coincidence, though this would be difficult to prove.
. . In the not too distant future, we will be able to construct artificial systems that give every appearance of consciousness—systems that act like us in every way. These systems will talk, walk, wink, lie, and appear distressed by close elections. They will swear up and down that they are conscious and they will demand their civil rights. But we will have no way to know whether their behavior is more than a clever trick—more than the pecking of a pigeon that has been trained to type "I am, I am!"
. . What do I believe is true but cannot prove? The answer is: You!
. . What makes humans uniquely smart?
. . Here's my best guess: we alone evolved a simple computational trick with far reaching implications for every aspect of our life, from language and mathematics to art, music and morality. The trick: the capacity to take as input any set of discrete entities and recombine them into an infinite variety of meaningful expressions.
. . Thus, we take meaningless phonemes and combine them into words, words into phrases, and phrases into Shakespeare. We take meaningless strokes of paint and combine them into shapes, shapes into flowers, and flowers into Matisse's water lilies. And we take meaningless actions and combine them into action sequences, sequences into events, and events into homicide and heroic rescues.
. . I'll go one step further: I bet that when we discover life on other planets, that although the materials may be different for running the computation, that they will create open ended systems of expression by means of the same trick, thereby giving birth to the process of universal computation.
. . I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance --so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.
. . But nothing's perfect. There may be a loophole. While it may seem --and even be-- impossible for us to explain how a brain process could have the quality of consciousness, it may not be at all impossible to explain how a brain process could (be designed to) give rise to the impression of having this quality. (Consider: we could never explain why 2 + 2 = 5, but we might relatively easily be able to explain why someone should be under the illusion that 2 + 2 = 5).
. . Do I want to prove it? That's a difficult one. If the belief that consciousness is a mystery is a source of human hope, there may be a real danger that exposing the trick could send us all to hell.
. . The Brain Basis of Talent
. . I believe that human talents are based on distinct patterns of brain connectivity. These patterns can be observed as the individual encounters and ultimately masters an organized activity or domain in his/her culture.
. . As we attempt to master an activity, neural connections of varying degrees of utility or disutility form. Certain of us have nervous systems that are predisposed to develop quickly along the lines needed to master specific activities (chess) or classes of activities (mathematics) that happen to be available in one or more cultures. Accordingly, assuming such exposure, we will appear talented and become experts quickly. The rest of us can still achieve some expertise, but it will take longer, require more effective teaching, and draw on intellectual faculties and brain networks that the talented person does not have to use.