Every year, Edge.com invites scientists and other intellectuals to
write brief essays in response to a single question. The essays,
ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages, are then published.
This Thursday we’re discussing the book, What Are You Optimistic
About? Join us at the Muhlenberg Library, 209 W 23rd St, (at 7th
Ave), 3rd floor community room, at 6:30 PM. No fees or
membership required. We may be videotaping again.
Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker’s response is The Decline of
Violence. It sounds strange, even preposterous. We think of the
20th century “world wars,” “crime in the streets,” the threat of
terrorists who are trying to steal or buy weapons of mass
destruction. We are focusing on the danger to ourselves -- as
we’ve evolved to do.
But we’ve also evolved intellects that are able to analyze danger
and make objective judgments about it. Pinker cites current
studies and books that indicate torture and murder is “almost
certainly a tiny fraction of what it was in centuries past” and that
“these practices are, to varying degrees, hidden, illegal,
condemned or at the very least . . . intensely controversial. In the
past they were no big deal,” he points out. “Even the mass
murders of the 20th century in Europe, China and the Soviet Union
probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a
typical biblical conquest or hunter-gatherer feud.”
There has also been some refocusing of anthropology in recent
years. Small communities remote from industrialized and
information-rich societies have for many decades been described
by anthropologists as “living in harmony with nature,” “without
crime,” or with “little crime or warfare,” protected by their isolation
from the evils of modern life. That wave of anthropology seems to
have crested. Revisiting the same communities and others
similarly isolated, anthropologists have gained new insights.
Interviewing people about others they knew who had died
sometimes indicated that as many as 30% of male deaths were
violent, victims of murders or warfare.
There are a few other interesting essays on this subject, some of
which anticipate the end of warfare, but Pinker’s essay is by far the
most plausible, and worth serious discussion.
Physicists have always been among Edge.com’s most enthusiastic
members and since these essays were written in 2007, you will not
be surprised that many focused their high beams of optimism on
the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which was to start up shortly. In
September of 2008, it was started, and a week or so later was shut
down for serious problems. It is scheduled to go on line again in
September 2009.
Some of the physicists who contributed to the book are optimistic
about advances in string theory, some are optimistic that string
theory will soon cease to dominate the scene, some are optimistic
that the world is so full of surprises their own current views will be
proven wrong (thereby opening new fascinating horizons). Their
brief essays are very accessible, and I highly recommend them –
and for those laymen who doubt this, you may go directly to the
essay by Jerry Adler, Senior editor, Newsweek, titled, “Sometime
in the 21st Century I will Understand 20th-Century Physics.”
Several writers have addressed the conflict between religion and
science. Philosopher Daniel Dennett sees people naturally
gravitating away from religion in each new generation as they have
access to knowledge on an increasingly broad scale. “Many
religions,” he writes, “have already made the transition, quietly deemphasizing the irrational elements in their heritages, abandoning
the xenophobic and sexist prohibitions of their recent past, and
turning their attention from doctrinal purity to moral
effectiveness.”
Scientific American columnist and publisher of Skeptic magazine
Michael Shermer writes that irrational religious beliefs exist in
America today on a scale similar to beliefs in, say, astrology, but
reminds us that it was only a few centuries ago that almost
everyone in England believed in witchcraft and prayer (and, come
to think of it, astrology). He briefly but clearly portrays the
transition of magic into science, a transition toward more orderly,
evidence-based beliefs, a transition continuing on indefinitely into
the future.
Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind indirectly addresses the
question of whether societal efforts such as education can have
more than a limited effect on human nature. “I am optimistic about
the adaptability of the human brain to answer questions that
evolution could not have designed it for. A brain that can rewire
itself to visualize four dimensions, or the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle, is clearly going way beyond what natural selection could
have wired into it.”
Psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman resorts, as we often do with
these issues, to metaphor. He does so in a charming way, titling
his essay The First Coming. He agrees with Robert Wright that
“the invisible hand of biological and cultural evolution ineluctably
selects for the complex over the simple because positive-sum
games have the survival and reproductive edge over zero-sum
games, and that over epochal time more and more complex
systems – fitfully but inevitably – arise.” He thus characterizes our
intellectual endeavors toward the qualities we attribute to God:
“Omniscience is arguably the ultimate end product of science.
Omnipotence is arguably the ultimate end product of technology.
Goodness is arguably the ultimate end product of positive
institutions.”
Our concept of God has those integral characteristics, and if we
ever come close to achieving them ourselves, we will have created
God.
He entices us with the 1950’s Isaac Asimov story titled, ‘The Last
Question’. In the year 2061, the universe, including earth, of
course, is cooling down and scientists feed a critical question to a
computer, “Can entropy be reversed?” The computer responds,
“Not enough data for a meaningful response.” In the next scene,
Earth’s inhabitants have fled the white dwarf that used to be our
sun for younger stars and as the galaxy continues to cool they ask
the miniaturized supercomputer, which contains all of human
knowledge, “Can entropy be reversed?” It answers, “Not enough
data.” This continues through more scenes, with the computer
ever more powerful and the cosmos ever colder. The answer,
however, remains the same. Trillions of years pass, and all life and
warmth in the universe have vanished. All knowledge is
compacted into a wisp of matter in the near-absolute zero of
hyperspace. The wisp asks itself, “Can entropy be reversed?”
“Let there be light,” it responds. And there was light.