The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
Edited by John Brockman
A feature review by Patrick Lawlor
Introduction
Forty years ago C.P.Snow gave a famous lecture where he bemoaned a schism that had opened up between two major intellectual cultures in society. One culture was composed of those from a literary background such as philosophers, historians and political theorists, and the other was the world of the hard sciences. Snow felt that the literary culture had unfairly hijacked society’s intellectual discourse and public policy debates, and that they had banished scientists to the role of mere technicians. He was especially disturbed by the fact that literary intellectuals were often ignorant of the most basic scientific principles, and that they failed to appreciate the true implications of the work of thinkers such as Darwin and Einstein on humanity’s destiny. Snow later expressed his hope that a “third culture” would arise to bridge this gap.
Nowadays, John Brockman is the self-appointed champion of the science camp, and he took Snow’s phrase as the title of his 1995 book, The Third Culture. Brockman was harsher in his assessment of literary intellectuals: he claimed that the humanities departments of the university had become lost in a phantom realm characterized by “comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.” The squabbling of these Freudians, neo-Marxists, and postmodernists was completely irrelevant; instead, said Brockman, the Third Culture would now consist of “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world” who are dealing with the real issues facing humanity in our new world of bioengineering, cyberspace, and nanotechnology. Science was now the dominant paradigm, like it or not, and the achievements of the new public culture it creates “will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.”
Brockman is not a scientist himself; he is a successful literary agent for many leading scientists, and the founder of Edge, an online forum for scientists from different disciplines to share their current research with each other and the general public. Every so often Brockman collects some of his interviews and packages them into a book. The New Humanists is his latest collection, including contributions from top scientists like Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Guth. The book also includes Brockman’s own title essay, in which he extends his vision of the Third Culture, plus an appendix of commentaries by various members of the Edge forum. (Most of the book’s material can be viewed for free online at www.Edge.org.) The interviews (edited into essay form) are naturally of mixed quality, but most are very interesting. They are grouped into three thematic parts: humanity, “post-humanity,” and physics.
Humanity
Part I: Homo Sapiens opens with Jared Diamond’s thesis on the surprising influence of geography on human civilizations. He asks why it was the Europeans who conquered America after 1492, rather than Aztec troops invading Madrid and Paris. Victorian scholars might have argued that “racial superiority” or the “Christian work ethic” had given Europeans the technological advantages that allowed them to dominate the globe, but Diamond goes back thirteen thousand years and makes a persuasive argument that it was the geography of the Eurasian landmass itself that provided the optimum environment for competitive social progress.
In 11,000 B.C. humans all over the planet were at the same Stone-Age level of development, but after the invention of agriculture, the people of Eurasia enjoyed considerable advantages. The long east-west axis of the continent allowed new crops developed in one region to spread rapidly throughout the land since climate and seasons were similar across the same latitudes. This was not the case for the Americas and Africa, which are laid out on a long north-south axis: it took thousands of years before corn developed in Mexico’s climate was able to be cultivated successfully in other parts of America. Another feature of the Eurasian continent was its immense size and large human population, making it an arena for constant competition (and war) between neighboring civilizations, spurring innovation. Diamond contrasts this with a smaller landmass like Australia, where the Aboriginal societies were much more isolated and therefore less anxious to develop new technologies for economic or military purposes.
Diamond notes a number of other factors, such as the acquired immunity to more diseases, that over thousands of years gradually accumulated to gave the peoples of Europe in the era of Columbus a civilization that was perfectly primed to spread outward and overpower other cultures. Diamond notes that none of this was due to any inherent moral or IQ “superiority” of the Europeans themselves. (Of course, the colonizers believed otherwise and, just as they had enslaved animals, they began to enslave those humans they considered “lesser” beings.) Diamond’s geographic analysis of human history is speculative, but he does a fine job in helping us look at our past with fresh eyes.
The biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham talks about the history of violence among three species: humans, chimpanzees, and bonobo apes. He makes the interesting observation that just as humans gradually domesticated fierce wolves into tame dogs over the centuries, we have also been domesticating ourselves: our teeth, jawbones and brain sizes have slowly mutated in ways that he thinks indicates that we are becoming more sociable and less aggressive as a species.
Marc Hauser is a cognitive neuroscientist who has been doing comparative studies of human and animal minds. He points out that each animal species is intelligent in its own way, as needed to solve its own particular problems. His study of primates has shown him that “there are elegant demonstrations” of their “representational capacities and thoughts.” Despite this evidence of animal intelligence, Hauser goes on to state that there are experiments that are “either unethical or logistically too difficult to run on humans but can be conducted with animals.” The logic that allows Hauser to believe that “unethical” experiments should be performed on some species he considers intelligent but not others is a mystery to me, and a horrible tragedy for the animals in his lab.
This part of the book also contains notable pieces such as Steven Pinker’s take on the “nature vs. nurture” debate, and Daniel Dennett on his role as a philosopher in cognitive science.
Post-Humanity
Part II of the book is labeled Machina Sapiens? and presents some scenarios for our future. The following alarming quotes are from the scientists in this section:
- "A great long-term art project for some rebellious kid in school now: Genetically engineer an animal with wheels! See if DNA can be made to do it."
- "The Orwell law of the future: any new technology that can be tried will be."
- "Fifty years from now, our technological infrastructure and our bodies may be indistinguishable."
- "We are entering a new era. I call it the Singularity. It’s a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence which is going to create something bigger than itself. It’s the cutting edge of evolution on our planet… which I predict will occur somewhere right before the middle of the twenty-first century."
- "Within thirty years we’ll be able to create nonbiological intelligence comparable to human intelligence."
- "We will have [software] entities by 2030 that seem to be conscious and that will claim to have feelings."
- "Should computers, perhaps at some point in the future, be placed inside the circle of empathy?"
- "One application of sending billions of nanobots into the brain is full-immersion virtual reality…"
- "With the technologies that exist today, the wealthy and the rest aren’t all that different… But with the technology of the next twenty or thirty years, they might be quite different indeed. Will the ultrarich and the rest even be recognizable as the same species by the middle of the new century? …The rich could have their children made genetically more intelligent, beautiful, and joyous."
I’ve deliberately chosen the above quotes out of context for their shock value, but they help to paint a vivid picture of the future we may be creating. The scientists that Brockman has interviewed about our possible “post-human” future offer a range of opinions and predictions. At one extreme is Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, who seems almost thrilled about the approaching Singularity event he forsees when humans and software-beings will somehow morph into a variety of new cyberspecies.
The best essay is by his opponent, computer scientist Jaron Lanier, although he offers rather cold comfort. He objects to Kurzweil’s “cybernetic totalism” on pragmatic grounds: Lanier thinks that just as our current software is plagued by bugs and crashes, any future bioengineered cyber-beings will also be prone to constant glitches and viruses. Lanier also disagrees with the cybernetic camp’s belief that the subjective experience of living beings is either an illusion or is unimportant. But Lanier doesn’t dispute that the new technologies may be bringing us to a crisis, a new gap between rich and poor, where the wealthy can afford genetically-enhanced children until “one day the richest among us could turn nearly immortal, becoming virtual gods to the rest of us.”
It is also interesting to note how some scientists are willing to ask whether “the circle of empathy” should be extended to include conscious “software-creatures” of the future, when they are not willing to do the same today for animals.
Physics
After the human-created nightmares described above, it is a relief to turn to the realm of pure physics in Part III of the book, Evolving Universes, which explores the latest theories in quantum gravity and cosmology. Unfortunately, despite my own engineering-school background in mathematics and physics, many of these complex theories are simply too difficult for me to fully comprehend. My mindbending attempts to conceptualize the universe they describe failed, and so all I could do was sit back and enjoy this group of physicists cheerfully describe the eleven dimensions of string theory, and the possibility that the periodic collision of two vast membranes recreates the cycle of our universe over and over again. In contrast to the intensity of the apocalyptic cybergeeks, it is striking how pleasant the physicists and cosmologists seem to be; clearly they are still in a state of child-like awe at the unfolding wonder of All of This.
The New Humanists?
Finally we come to Brockman’s own title essay, The New Humanists. After all these years, he still goes straight into attack mode: “Unlike the humanities academicians, who talk about each other, scientists talk about the universe.” The traditional literary camp is “indulging itself in cultural pessimism,” in contrast to the optimism of science, whose discoveries are “either good news or news that can be made good thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques.” Therefore, Brockman believes that today’s scientists deserve to be called the New Humanists, and that they have inherited this mantle directly from Leonardo and Michelangelo. Brockman will allow a few other rare individuals into this club, but only “the science-based humanities scholars” the ones who “think like scientists.” Probably Brockman is being deliberately provocative in order to make his point. Certainly his insistance that the only opinions that matter are those of people who “think like scientists” is absurd.
Even a few of the scientists on his Edge forum disagree with Brockman’s triumphalist stance, and he has commendably included their comments in the book’s epilogue. Mihalyi Czikszentmikalyi points out that the sciences and humanities play different roles: science opens up new potential possibilities for us, while the humanities help us evaluate and judge which of these possibilities to choose. The tragedy is that our ethical philosophies have failed in this function, while our unchecked technologies are now able to manifest every imaginable possibility, both the good and the monstrous.
The New Humanists is a very worthwhile, thought-provoking collection.The interviews give us a fascinating view of the universe and ourselves, for better or worse. It is simply unfortunate that Brockman never introduces terms like compassion, love, or even ethics into the description of his new Third Culture. He deliberately invokes Leonardo da Vinci as one of the models for his New Humanists, and yet it is difficult to imagine that Leonardo, the vegetarian who liberated captive birds, could participate in current science projects that deliberately bioengineer animals with birth-defects, or torture chimpanzees to see the effect on their brainwaves. The true gap is not between the humanities and the sciences, but between our incredibly selfish, stupid actions and our own discarded capacity for caritas, a genuine caring for all other beings. Brockman’s vision is unfortunately not yet a culture that can truly be called humanitarian.
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