Education: that which reveals to the wise, and
conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.... I have
never let my schooling interfere with my education. —Mark Twain
TOPICS: KNOW-A-LOTS, FROM THE WIRES, THOUGHT LEADERS
Abstract: "Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know."
COOS BAY (A-P) — The Edge has been asking public intellectuals (with scientists over-represented) annual questions for twenty years and the editor ran out of questions, ending the asking. The last question was in the form of, 'Okay, what should the last question be?' There were 284 responses from the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, Lawrence Krauss, Helen Fisher, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Susan Blackmore, Thomas Metzinger, Gloria Origgi, Toby Ord.... Complete list with questions here.
My interest is in the questions as a set of data representing the zeitgeist mind of the highly educated with a clear bias towards science. The humanities are represented by a large number of social scientists and scholars.
The 284 respondents (many wearing more than one hat) includes:
What is the principle that causes complex adaptive systems (life, organisms, minds, societies) to spontaneously emerge from the interaction of simpler elements (chemicals, cells, neurons, individual humans)?
What does justice feel like?
Will the universe observed today someday begin to contract, bounce, and be reborn?
When will race disappear?
Can we design a modern society without money which is at least as effective economically and politically as our current system?
How will the advent of direct brain-to-brain communication change the way we think?
What is the cosmic perspective to the future of life?
Is the botscape going to force us to give up the use of the first-person singular nominative case personal pronoun, I?
How did our complex universe arise out of simple physical laws?
How can we rebel against our genes if we are biological creatures without free will?
When in the evolution of animal life did the capacity to experience love for another being first emerge?
Will we ever be replaced by another earthly species capable of evolving to a similar degree of social and technical sophistication that effectively fills the biocultural niche we vacated?
What is the fundamental geometric structure underlying reality?
Could the thermodynamic prophecy of an increasingly entropic universe be fulfilled by the cosmic flourishing of intelligent life?
Is it possible to control a system capable of evolving?
Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable?
How will evolution shape the biological world one hundred years from now, or one hundred thousand?
Does every mathematical symmetry have a manifestation in the physical world?
Will the individual quantum event forever remain random?
How diverse is life in the universe?
Does the infinite multiverse of cosmologists, in which all that is physically possible occurs, contain realizations of our unruly paradoxes of infinity (Hilbert’s Hotel, Thomson Lamp, 1+2+3+4… = -1/12; etc.)?
Is the universe like an onion that will require science to keep peeling back new layers of reality and asking questions forever?
Is there a fundamental difference between the biological world and the physical world?
Do the laws of physics change with the passage of time?
What is the master principle governing the growth and evolution of complex systems?
How much of what we call "reality" is ultimately grounded and instantiated in convincing communication and storytelling?
Are the laws of physics unique and inevitable?
Is there a single theory of all physics (TOP), and what is it?
Can an increasingly powerful species survive (and overcome) the actions of its most extreme individuals?
Why is it that the maximum information we can pack into a region of space does not depend on the volume of the region, but only on the area that bounds it?
Is there a design to the laws of physics, or are they the result of chance and the laws of large numbers?
Can a single underlying process explain the emergence of structure at the physical, biological, cognitive, and machine levels?
Where were the laws of physics written before the universe was born?
Is gravity a fundamental law of nature, or does gravity—and thereby spacetime—emerge as a consequence of the underlying quantum nature of reality?
How will advances in mental prosthetics that connect us with other human and machine minds change the way we think about expertise?
Will artistic invention enlighten the age of AI?
What does it mean to be human?
Why should we prize the original object over a perfect replica?
Will the process of discovery be completed in any of the natural sciences?
Why be good?
If we discover another intelligent civilization, what should we ask them?
Does something unprecedented happen when we finally learn our own source code?
What proportion of "ethnic" and "religious" tensions are rooted in our genes?
What is the biological price of being a species with a sense of humor?
How can we sculpt how individual brains develop to avert mental illness?
Which facets of life will we never understand once biological and cultural diversity has vanished?
Can humans set a non-evolutionary course that is game-theoretically stable?
Will the frontiers of consciousness be technological or linguistic?
Why did we acquire our extraordinary human capacity for social learning?
Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes?
Can the human brain ever fully understand quantum mechanics?
Does consciousness reside only in our brains?
What would the ability to synthesize creativity do to cultural evolution?
How do our microbes contribute to that particular combination of continuity and change that makes us human?
How do ideas about biological evolution change once one species has control over the origin and extinction of all other species?
How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of the year 1900?
Why do we get to ask questions at all?
Will some things about life, consciousness, and society necessarily remain unseen?
Is our continued coexistence with the other big mammals essential to furthering our understanding of human cognition?
Are stories bad for us?
What is the hard limit on human longevity?
Will we ever find an organization form that brings out the best in people?
How can we reap the benefits of the wide and open exchange of data without undermining the values that depend upon the scarcity of information?
What is the purpose of it?
Is the accumulation of shared knowledge forever constrained by the limits of human language?
What new cognitive abilities will we need to live in a world of intelligent machines?
Why are the errors that our best machine-learning algorithms make so different from the errors we humans make?
Must we suffer and die?
Are there limits to what we can know about the universe?
Can we re-design our education system based on the principle of neurodiversity?
Why are people so seldom persuaded by clear evidence and rational argument?
Why is sleep so necessary?
Why do some people act inside the law, others outside, and others create the law?
Will humanity eventually exhaust the unknown?
Will our AI future forms need the natural world?
How will humanity change in light of the increasing use of non-sexual methods of reproduction?
When will we accept that the most accurate clocks will have to advance regularly sometimes, irregularly most of the time, and at times run counterclockwise?
Why is Homo sapiens the sole non-extinct species of hominin?
Will a baby grown from an embryo constructed from human stem cells eventually become a person?
How will we build the tools to maintain the software in long-lived online devices that can kill us?
Will the behavior of a superintelligent AI be mostly determined by the results of its reasoning about the other superintelligent AIs?
Is the unipolar future of a "singleton" the inevitable destiny of intelligent life?
i = we ?
Can behavioral science crack the ultimate challenge of getting people to durably adopt much healthier lifestyles?
Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?
Why do humans behave as though what can be known is finite?
Is there a way for humans to directly experience what it’s like to be another entity?
What is the optimal algorithm for discovering truth?
How do I know the right level of abstraction at which to explain a phenomenon?
Is technology changing the nature of moral emotions?
How can aims of individual liberty and economic efficiency be reconciled with aims of social justice and environmental sustainability?
Can a user-friendly computer proof assistant satisfy the mathematician’s desire for certainty without killing the pleasure?
Why is the phenomenon too familiar to investigate the hardest thing to completely understand?
Can we create technologies that help equitably reduce the amount of conflict in the world?
Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?
What will happen to human love when we can design the perfect robot lover?
Why do we care so much about how well we're approximated by algorithms?
Will a machine ever be able to feel what an organism feels?
Why don't naked mole rats age or get cancer?
Can we acquire complete access to our unconscious minds?
What will be the literally last question that will preoccupy future superintelligent cosmic life for as long as the laws of physics permit?
How can AI and other digital technologies help us create global institutions that we can trust?
Why do humans who possess or acquire unaccountable power over others invariably abuse it?
Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end the "battle of the sexes"?
Can natural selection's legacy of sex differences in values be reconciled with the universal values of the Enlightenment?
Is there a subtle form of consciousness that operates independent of brain function?
How can we put rational prices on human lives without becoming inhuman?
What is the fastest way to reliably align a powerful AGI around the safe performance of some limited task that is potent enough to save the world from unaligned AGI?
In what situations does the capacity for low mood give a selective advantage?
How can we separate the assessment of scientific evidence from value judgments?
Are feelings computable?
Are moral beliefs more like facts or more like preferences?
Can brain implants make us better human beings?
Does romantic love have a biological function?
How much biodiversity do we need?
How can science best leverage unreason to overcome the heroic passion for war?
How does a single human brain architecture create many kinds of human minds?
How far will we go in predicting human behavior from DNA?
Do we need checks and balances for virtual worlds?
Why is human communication embedded in the silence of material objects?
How can we achieve closed-loop neural control of human hedonics?
Is a human brain capable of understanding a human brain?
What ethical responsibilities will humans owe to AGI systems?
What libraries will we have to build when cloning becomes infinitely expandable?
What is the flow of information through human beings?
How did our sense of mathematical beauty arise?
Why is the acceleration of the expansion of the universe roughly equal to a typical acceleration of a star in a circular orbit in a disk galaxy?
Will reading and writing survive given the seduction of video and audio?
Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body?
What is the bumpiest and highest-dimensional cost surface that our best computers will be able to search and still find the deepest cost well?
How do contemporary developments in technology affect human cultural diversity?
Is our brain fundamentally limited in its ability to understand the external world?
What is the upper limit for how malleable the human mind and our emotions can actually be?
Will a computer ever really understand and experience human kindness?
What can humanity do right now that will make the biggest difference over the next billion years?
Will it ever be possible for us to transcend our limited experience of time as linear?
Are dreams brief glimpses of the narrative of a subconscious alternative reality?
Why do even the most educated people today feel that their grip on what they can truly know is weaker than ever before?
How much would surrendering our god(s) strengthen the odds of our survival?
What will happen to religion on earth when the first alien life form is found?
Why are humans still so much more flexible in their thinking and everyday reasoning than machines?
Can human intuition ever be reduced to an algorithm?
Will it be possible to do surgical operations in the future without making incisions?
How do we create and maintain backup options for humanity to quickly rebuild an advanced civilization after a catastrophic human extinction event?
Can the pace of human evolution stop accelerating?
Can technology tame evolution?
How can we build machines that make us smarter?
Can we design a common test to assess machine, animal and human intelligence?
Is there any observational evidence that could shake your faith, or lack thereof?
What would a diagram that gave a complete understanding of imagination need to be?
Why is there such widespread public opposition to science and scientific reasoning in the United States, the world leader in every major branch of science?
How can coalitions of scholars who wish to update the content of explicit common knowledge in order to use that knowledge collaboratively detect and circumvent coalitions which are applying narrative control strategies to preserve arbitrage opportunities implicit in disparities between official narratives and reality?
Could superintelligence be the purpose of the universe?
Are the simplest bits of information in the brain stored at the level of the neuron?
Will we ever live together in a hive?
Why is it so difficult to influence people’s belief systems for deeply held beliefs and so easy to manipulate belief systems when little is known about the subject?
What are the beautiful curiosities that artificial curiosities can't comprehend?
Will humanity end up with one culture?
How will people focus more on forming the right question, before rushing headlong towards the answer?
Will questioning be replaced by answering without questions?
What systems could be put in place to prevent widespread denial of science-based knowledge?
Are humans ever really capable of regarding others as ends in themselves?
What is the most important thing that can be done to restore the general public’s faith and trust in science?
How could one last question possibly be enough?
Clarify the differences between understanding, knowledge and wisdom that could be communicated to a literate twelve-year-old and recommunicated to their parents.
Is the assertion "Nothingness is impossible" the most fundamental statement we can make about our existence?
How would changes in the marginal tax rate affect our efforts and motivation?
How will the world be changed when battery storage technology improves at the same exponential rate seen in computer chips in recent decades?
How smart does another animal have to be for us to decide not to eat it?
Is immortality desirable?
How much time will pass between the last minute before artificial superintelligence and the first minute after it?
Will we ever understand how human communication is built from genes to cells to circuits to behavior?
When will we develop a robust theory of Ontological Intelligence (OI)?
Can you prove it?
How do we best build a civilization that is galvanized by long-term thinking?
Will human psychology keep pace with the exponential growth of technological innovation associated with cultural evolution?
In which century or millennium can all humanity be expected to speak the same primary language?
How will predictive models in the social sciences achieve the accuracy and precision of those in the natural sciences?
Will blockchain return us to the golden age of ownership of information licenses that can be resold like books and records?
Can major historical events, from the advent of moral religions to the industrial revolution, be explained by changes in life history strategies?
How many incommensurable ideas can we hold in our mind simultaneously?
How does a thought become a feeling?
Is the universe relatively simple and comprehensible by the human brain, or is it so complex, higher dimensional and multiversal that it remains forever elusive to humans?
Can we create new senses for humans—not just touch, taste, vision, hearing, smell, but totally novel qualia for which we don't yet have words?
What new methodology will be required to explain the neural basis of consciousness?
Can we train machines to design and construct a humane and vibrant built environment for us?
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?
Are accurate mathematical theories of individual human behavior possible?
What will courtship, mate selection, length of marriages, and family composition and networks be like when we are all living over 150 years?
Why are reason, science, and evidence so impotent against superstition, religion, and dogma?
Will weaving networks that blend humans and machines yield network effects?
Can we develop a procedure that, in principle, would tell us whether or not our universe is a simulation (analogous to the way the now proven Poincaré Conjecture can tell us the universe’s shape)?
Can we ever wean humans off their addiction to religion?
What would comprise the most precise and complete sonic representation of the history of life?
What will time with artifacts that simulate the emotional experience of being with another person do to our human capacity to handle the surely rougher, more frictional, and demanding human intimacies on offer?
How do the limits of the mind limit our understanding?
If science does in fact confirm that we lack free will, what are the implications for our notions of blame, punishment, reward, and moral responsibility?
What will it take for us to be fully confident that we have found life elsewhere in the cosmos?
What is consciousness?
Why is the world so beautiful?
How does the past give rise to the future?
What is the world without the mind?
What quirk of evolution caused us to develop the ability to do pure mathematics?
Will humans ever prove the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics?
Can we engineer a human being?
Is a single world language and culture inevitable?
Does religious engagement promote or impede morality, altruism, and human flourishing?
Is there an evolutionary advantage to building societies that favor entertaining over understanding?
What is the most intelligent and efficient way to minimize the overall amount of conscious suffering in the universe?
Will we be one of the last generations in human history that dies?
What might the last fully biological human's statement be at their last supper?
What will it take to end war once and for all?
What would the mind of a child raised in total isolation of other animals be like?
When will we replace governments with algorithms?
Is the actual all that is possible?
Why is it so hard to find the truth?
What behaviors are we attributing only to brain mechanisms that may be better explained by considering biomechanics?
Is there a place for our past in our future?
Will humans ever embrace their own diversity?
Will civilization collapse before I die?
Does this question exist in a parallel universe?
What future progressive norms would most forward-thinking people today dismiss as too transgressive?
Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without purpose?
Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality?
How complex must be the initial design of the simplest machine that can learn from experience to achieve, at a minimum, the intelligence and abilities of a typical human being?
Which questions should we not ask and not try to answer?
What kinds of minds could solve the mind-body problem?
Will the appearance of new species of talented computational intelligence result in improving the moral behavior of persons and societies?
Is civilization's demand for water a dividing or unifying force?
Was agriculture a wrong turn for civilization?
What knowledge and know-how are our descendants at risk of forgetting as our species passes through future evolutionary bottlenecks?
When will "human being" cease to be a meaningful category to speak of?
Can we program a computer to find a 10,000-bit string that encodes more actionable wisdom than any human has ever expressed?
Can general-purpose computers be constructed out of pure gravity?
What will be obvious to us in a generation that we have an inkling of today?
Are there any phenomena for which it will never be possible to develop parsimonious theories?
Can rational beings such as Bayesian robots, humans, super-intelligent AIs ever reach agreement?
Will there ever be a mechanistic scientific question that can be asked about the lone individuality of mental life, with its particular beginning, middle, and end?
Is the brain a computer or an antenna?
Is love really all you need?
Will it ever be possible to download the information stored in the human brain?
Will the "hard problem" of consciousness dissolve (rather than be solved) as we learn more about the natural world?
Will a comprehensive mathematics of human behavior ever be created?
Is there a single, evolved biological mechanism that can be tweaked to improve overall health, cognitive abilities, and slow aging?
How will we know if we achieve universal happiness?
Why are we so often kind to strangers when nobody is watching and we have nothing to gain?
Will AI make the Luddites (mostly) right?
Will the creation of a super-human class from a combination of genome editing and direct biological-machine interfaces lead to the collapse of civilization?
Is the number of interesting questions finite or not?
Will post-humans be organic or electronic?
What cognitive capacities make humans so damn weird relative to all the other animals on the planet?
Would you like to live 1,000 years?
Are we smart enough to know when we’ve reached the limits of our ability to understand the universe?
What will be the use of 99% of humanity for the 1%?
What does the conscious mind do that is impossible for the unconscious mind?
Is intersubjectivity possible in a quantum mechanical universe?
How will we cope when we are capable of keeping humans alive longer than our optimal life expectancy?
Has consciousness done more good or bad for humanity?
Will the "third culture" be followed by a fourth culture, a fifth culture, and, ominously, a Final Culture?
What will we do as an encore once we manage to develop technological solutions to infection, aging, poverty, asteroids, and heat death of the universe?
How can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question, including this one?
How do I describe the achievements, meanings, and power of Beethoven's piano sonata “Appassionata”?
How far can we extend beyond our human limitations to more fully grasp the nature of the world?
Is there a Turing test for living rather than thinking that can distinguish animate from automata?
So, before The Singularity...?
How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover the unwitting teamwork that turns that dynamic clump into a person who can love, notice, wonder, and keep a promise?
Is it ultimately possible for life to bend the shape of the universe to fit life's purposes, as we are now bending the shape of our environment here on earth?
If we want to make a real and effective science-based policy, should we change politics or science?
How and when will it end or will it persist indefinitely?
Are the ways qualia relate to computation, creativity to free will, risk to probability, morality to epistemology, all the same question?
Are humans capable of building a moral economy?
How can the process of science be improved?
Is there an ultimate reality?
Can wild animals that are large and dangerous be made averse to threatening humans?
Why are there no trees in the ocean?
Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?
If the sum of all significant knowledge is finite, what proportion of it can humans, aided by intelligent machines, eventually attain?
If we're not the agents of ourselves (and it's hard to see how we can be), how can we make sense of moral accountability (and how can we live coherently without it)?
How can the few pounds of grey goo between our ears let us make utterly surprising, completely unprecedented, and remarkably true discoveries about the world around us, in every domain and at every scale, from quarks to quasars?
Why?
Have we left the Age of Reason, never to return?
How can we empower the better angels of our nature?
Given the nature of life, the purposeless indifference of the universe, and our complete lack of free will, how is it that most people avoid ever being clinically depressed?
Does the future belong to non-human entities?
My question is: What percentage of the questions are humancentric vs naturcentric? A few hours of parsing the data and this natural science biased sample (35% of total are scientists, with 60% studying humans, e.g. many human psychologists) of high achievers is 30 naturcentric questions, 10.6% vs 89.4% humancentric. Questions not clearly humancentric were counted as naturcentric, so for this group, figure 10% naturcentric vs 90% humncentric.
For a group of randomly selected humans, figure at most 1% naturcentric, and 99% humancentric, e.g. MSM and social media, religious, political, public servants, activists, teachers, butchers, bakers, video game players.....
Modern techno-industrial society/culture is not viable as we cannot listen to Nature view as an externality that exists for our occasional consumption. Nature, as in she who has all the answers. We listen to our own prattle and that of other know-a-lots who don't even know that they know nothing (other than that tautologies are true by definition).
SUBNOTE TO FILE 1/5/23
Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist and YouTube podcaster (Science without the Gobbledgook) with 683K subscribers, notes that human population will peak by the end of this century under carrying capacity, so Musk is right to be concerned about underpopulation. Within her area of expertise she likely knows enough to have an opinion and defines 'highly intelligent' for most Anthropocene enthusiasts. She certainly knows enough (thinks she does) to dismiss doomsters and boomsters as foundationally in error, as neither knows that:
"According to the conservative estimates for the carrying capacity of the world and extrapolations for population trends, it looks like the global population is going to peak relatively soon below carrying capacity. Population decrease is going to lead to huge changes in power structures both nationally and internationally. That’ll cause a lot of political tension and economic stress. And this doesn’t even include the risk of killing off a billion people or so with pandemics, wars, or a major economic crisis induced by climate change."
"So both the doomsters and boomsters are wrong. The doomsters are wrong to think that overpopulation is the problem, but right in thinking that we have a problem. The boomsters are right in thinking that the world can host many more people but wrong in thinking that we’re going to pull it off. And I’m afraid Musk is right. If we’d play our cards more wisely, we could almost certainly squeeze some more people on this planet. And seeing that the most relevant ingredient to progress is human brains, if progress is what you care about, then we’re not on the best possible track." Is Elon Musk right in saying that we are too few people? So make this number 285 and question everything, especially claims make by experts, especially when seriously out of their depths.
Actually, conservative estimates range from 50 million (people who want to live at an American level of consumption and yet leave room for Nature) to 2 billion (people who live as commoners-80%, e.g. serfs, peasants, slaves, wage earners..., and elites-20% who view nature and commoners as an externality) of 30+ ecologists polled one-on-one per ecologist Rex Weyler, but in our democratic minded society the majority consensus narrative rules and anyone plying social media and wanting lots of subscribers/money had better tell them what they want/like to hear. Not all hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings know enough (outside their expertise) to have an opinion (and maybe 1% of them know this). The rest are too clever by half and not nearly smart enough to not be part of the problematique of modern humans. It is a free market out there and to persist you have to play by the unwritten rules of the game, or have a video channel with two subscribers like me (one is my wife and I happen to know she doesn't watch/like/share any of my offerings).
