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.
We can add:
Stephen Hawking changed his mind about whether there could be a final ‘theory of everything’ or not. In his 2004 lecture Stephen Hawking
“Gödel and the end of physics” he concludes that limitations of the sort which Kurt Gödel identified for mathematics apply also to physics: “a physical theory is self referencing, like in Gödel’s theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent, or incomplete. The theories we have so far, are both inconsistent and incomplete.”
Antony Flew changed his mind about atheism changed his mind about atheism”, he now says that he believes in “an intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world.”
Garth
Well am I surprised to hear that Sean wanted to be a heretic. If I have known earlier, I would have not hidden my secret desire to be one, and hide from him the talks I gave when I was his student about being a Cosmological Heretic…
Nowadays, being heretical is simply my night job. My day job consists of computing stuff that people may actually observe. Needless to say, my night job is more fun but my day job keeps me honest (and employed).
Hmm, that link to wopat.uchicago.edu seems to be broken. I must have forgotten a bracket somewhere (the website is fine.)
I couldn’t resist the idea of a unified theory of the brain. But after reading
Stanislas Deheane saying
“Another reason why I am excited about Friston’s law is, paradoxically, that it isn’t simple. It seems to have just the right level of distance from the raw facts. Much like Schrödinger’s equation cannot easily be turned into specific predictions, even for an object as simple as a single hydrogen atom, Friston’s theory require heavy mathematical derivations before it ultimately provides useful outcomes.”
I find myself just a wee bit skeptical. What in the world can he mean by this? Has he never heard of the Balmer series?
And then a bit later we have Helena Cronin expounding on a theory of
of male superiority in the sciences that we last heard from Lubos Motl and
and a certain past Harvard president: it’s all in the tails of the distribution.
Oh well. It is worth keeping in mind that the Edge website is primarily a PR
machine for John Brockman and his clients.
Similarly with my link to Stephen Hawking’s
“Gödel and the end of physics”.
Does that work?
N.B. I only have a ‘submit’ and not a ‘review’ button on this page, so it is impossible to check and repair mistakes, which I tend to do rather too often!
Could that be changed?
Garth
I was looking forward to see arguments in support of fraternities, and mostly college sports. That could be interesting, since I cannot imagine too many good arguments to support the latter, at least the way things are done now. The strange thing is, unless I am missing it, Jonathan Haidt’s piece did not specifically refer to either one of those…
Pingback: Geoff Arnold » Blog Archive » “What have you changed your mind about?”
Sean:
“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.”
Well, that you consider it “depressing” is a good sign! That heretic is still inside, give him more incentive and opportunity to get out.
As for Wikipedia: I too am real impressed with that product. It simply amazes me how just about every article has that professional look about it, following the standard format very well, few signs of marring by smart alecks or meanies or cranks etc. and mostly correct AFAICT. (I made my first edit several weeks ago, adjusting the biography of Katherine Lee Bates.) Somehow people instinctively respect the process, and that affects them if they decide to edit – the wow, this is real and people look up to this, etc. But look out, there are fiddles with political biographies and etc.
I find it slightly disheartening that Hawking is actually enjoying the incompleteness Godel has cast us in, for the sake of keeping everybody “employed”. It’s actually a very frightening sort of thought, probably because it leads to situations where the only way to proceed is to let go of causality (hence predicate logic in some key situations) for example. It sucks when physical reality has to bypass mathematical limitations to explain itself. I just can’t believe he’s happy about it.
On topic: in 2007 I changed my mind about science blogs being useless. Having top physics professors compile the news for you is a Good Thing, it turns out. So here’s a big thank you for all the effort, and wishing you all a Happy (and scientifically revolutionary, we hope) 2008.
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. Supposed examples or producers of randomness like “random variables” are just stipulated generators of such output, not the actual structure being specified that could do it. Someone has to arrange for the output “by hand” by for example specifying that digits of some root be used – that is not true, unpredictable in principle quantum randomness. Physical reality has to bypass mathematical limitations to explain itself, but I’m the sort who thinks that’s cool, not sucks.
I sure hope your last plea turns out that way.
Neil: you are right of course, but I wasn’t talking about “randomness”, though that is probably a large part of the discussion. I am talking about situations where the relationships are problematic simply because of the way logic works. Godel showed examples with GR, and Einstein was stumped. No randomness there, just a logical barrier due to the self-referential issue. Breaking out of that will require some very interesting physics.
Randomness and simulated randomness is a separate, and less problematic problem (IMHO). I recommend Feynman’s “simulating physics with computers” if you haven’t read it already.
I have to admit I find the editing of this post absolutely bizarre. Is it just sloppiness or is there a deliberate attempt at misrepresentation?
The most obvious example is the Oliver Morton case, where what is quoted implies the complete opposite of his point; but the Helen Fisher case likewise misses the point (not that humans are serial monogamists, which she’s been on about for years, but that the divorce peak does not happen at around seven years like she thought).
Neil, I think Max would say you are taking a “frog’s eye” view.
Godel’s theorems about consistency and completeness apply to specific simple Peano-like systems that have nothing to do with the universe or any physical theory. Hilbert aspired at one mad point to axiomatize physics but could not succeed even for classical mechanics. Hawking’s remarks seem ethereal and useless. The question of whether or not physics can ever be complete remains a profound and unanswerable one, but as far as I can see Godel’s work is unrelated to it. Please correct me if I’m mistaken here, as the question is of course very interesting.
I was a bit shocked about the quantum inflation article.
Is that really true?
Tor Nørretranders says “New atoms will have to learn to remember your childhood.” What does this mean? Surely our memories are not storied in atoms, but in larger structures (I presume nerve cell connections). How does this support the notion of ourselves as software and not hardware?
I would suggest the following definitions. We’re interested in machines that manipulate certain types of inputs. Software is those aspects of the machine that can be changed by these inputs, hardware cannot. The order of structures on a hard disk can be changed by inputs, this is software, the mechanism by which these structures are read cannot be changed, it’s hardware. Our memories and thoughts are changed by what we experience, these are software, but the mechanisms by which we sense and learn cannot be changed, these are hardware.
Mike, I tend to agree. I think the purportedly surprising realization is that it’s only the structure of our body that persists long-term, not the set of specific atoms; but as long as that structure doesn’t really change, I’m not sure how useful it is to think of it as “software.”
andy.s, Paul’s view is a minority, but I think there is a lot of truth there. Inflation is much less firmly established than many presentations would have you believe.
According to the Guardian, as quoted on the Edge web site, the people answering this question “are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to make sense of the universe and answer the big questions. ”
I couldn’t help but note that Dr. A. Garrett Lisi is one of the respondents on the Edge web site. Mr. Lisi may be a wonderful person, but in the world of science he
is famous only for being famous. Who next, Paris Hilton? I fear for us all if
this is the intellectual elite.
Pingback: sysrick.com » links for 2008-01-02
Pingback: ????????? - ???
Steinhardt’s argument, that inflation doesn’t operate in the way many cosmologists would like to imagine, is very interesting. In recent talks he has been doing an excellent job of pointing out the problems with inflation [including the fact that it requires low-entropy initial conditions]. In fact he does a much better job of this than of explaining his alternative theory….inflation is probably a big part of the true story, but only a part. Anyway, Steinhardt is one of those people with a lot of interesting ideas, and anybody who has the guts to face down Andrei Linde has to be admired.
Did anyone see one talking about doubly special relativity? That’s the thing I’ve changed my mind about recently!
Regarding the need to “refresh” a memory after it is accessed – when I first wake up in the morning, I can (hazily) remember what I was dreaming about. But as soon as I access it, it’s gone! What is it about memories of dreams that prevents us from refreshing them, as compared to memories of other things, which we can refresh?
Mark:I can (hazily) remember what I was dreaming about.
If it was a consistent effort on your part how would it be any different then remembering what happened yesterday? Depends on “what you want to remember?”
I still find “the change” intriguing and how it would change “current thinking?”
Dear Sean,
If I might follow Neil B. and also quote from your piece on Edge:
“As an undergraduate astronomy I was involved in a novel and exciting test of Einstein’s general relativity — measuring the precession of orbits, just like Mercury in the Solar System, but using massive eclipsing binary stars. What made it truly exciting was that the data disagreed with the theory! (Which they still do, by the way.)”
I am inclined to believe that you may have been onto something there. Bear in mind that our solar system is a place where electromagnetic, ie torsion effects, are relatively negligible, and in the general scheme of things, our sun is a mere pebble compared to some stars. So torsion and curvature are small in our system. However, in the case you studied, deformation would have been considerably larger. What would be even more interesting would be if one could find a binary neutron star system, and compare the data, since then not only the curvature would be significant but also the magnetic field strength.
What I am essentially trying to say is that to successfully predict the precession of Mercury in a low curvature, low torsion system you could use any number of theories, with any number of fudge factors; however, one of these in particular would not necessarily also work for when various physical factors become more significant, in more extreme astronomical examples.
Apologies on being a bit wordy and imprecise. But I hope you can see that your youthful aspirations may still be vindicated with this data.