As always, the responses to the annual Edge.org question are endlessly fascinating. This year's question was: What have you changed your mind about, and why?
The questions of previous years, here.
Edit: Particularly interesting responses by Joseph Ledoux about the workings of memory, Donald Hoffman and Peter Trivers on perception and self-deception, Scott Atran on the religious politics of fictive kinship, and Rupert Sheldrake on the skepticism of believers.
Tor Norretrander's views about permanent reincarnation are reminiscent of Derek Parfit's conception of the self.
I once talked with a computational linguist who shared Marti Hearst's surprise at the amount of things you can do in the field of language processing using only relatively simple, statistical techniques. That so much of our speech can be characterized and analyzed with such low-level techniques - which involve no real "understanding" - is a bit chilling.
What's really chilling is Thomas Metzinger's contribution about neuroethics and the nonexistence of moral facts.
2 comments:
Rupert Sheldrake is a fraud, but he is at least a pretty interesting fraud.
It was he who came up with that wacky idea of the "morphogenetic field", wasn't he? Nevertheless, his Edge.org contribution was pretty cogent, I think.
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