Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly said that small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas. If she was right, my own mind took a huge leap toward greatness in the last few weeks.
It all started when I stumbled upon a conversation between Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari, published on the website Edge under the title, “Death is Optional” (3/4/2015). The conversation was engrossing: Kahneman is a professor of psychology at Princeton whose Nobel Prize nevertheless was in economic science (2002); Harari lectures in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and likes to investigate the links between history and other disciplines such as biology, psychology, etc. His ability to put problems into long-term perspective is illustrated by the global success of his Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015).
From metaphysics to technology
One intriguing notion (albeit a digression from our topic) coming out of the conversation between those two original minds was that throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems – something that the gods decreed. The idea of death conjured an image of the Angel of Death appearing, touching you on the shoulder, and saying, “Come. Your time has come.” Today the attitude towards disease, old age, and death has changed: They are viewed as basically technical problems that should have some technical solution. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle people always die as a result of technical, not metaphysical, causes. This is a huge revolution in human thinking, carrying the implication that someday, if I'm rich enough, my death may become optional.
Extreme as that thought might seem, it is increasingly shared by our scientific elites. The Financial Times just published (4/10/2015) an interview with Raymond Kurzweil, whose professed ultimate goal is “to live forever.” While some critics find him a “narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity,” I believe that Kurzweil should not be written off too hastily. His first award-winning invention (in high school) was a computer program to analyze composers’ melodies and write original music in the same style. He also invented the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the flatbed scanner, and a music synthesizer capable of reproducing the sound of a grand piano, before finally joining Google in 2012 as a director of engineering to develop machine intelligence. Bill Gates (Trades, Portfolio) has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” For Kurzweil, to live forever means staying healthy enough to get to what he dubs “Bridge Two, when the biotechnology revolution will reprogramme our inherited biology, and Bridge Three: molecular nanotechnology enabling us to rebuild our bodies.”
More generally, according to the FT, Silicon Valley’s tech elite no longer views death as inevitable, but only as the latest evil to be “disrupted.”
Ignorance and enlightened chaos
But back on point: Another interesting observation derived from the conversation between Kahneman and Harari, and addressed in the latter’s Sapiens, is that the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries – when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry transformed views of society and nature – was not a revolution of knowledge but, above all, a revolution of ignorance. Pre-modern traditions of knowledge, such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great discovery that launched the scientific revolution was the insight that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. It was the discovery of ignorance.
These musings take me back to Edge (www.edge.org), a website founded by John Brockman, a literary agent specializing in serious nonfiction (mostly scientific). Among other endeavors, Edge every year asks a single question of 150-200 leading scientists and researchers. The 2014 question, which particularly titillated me, is best summarized by the title of its published collection of answers (Harper Perennial, 2015):
This Idea Must Die:
Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress
I find it exhilarating to have so much of our scientific elite capable of questioning the generally accepted wisdom that they have helped create or sustain. To me, this is a typically American phenomenon.
Some years ago, two different Chinese journalists interviewed me and asked the same question, which was very popular at the time: “Do you think China can innovate?” I responded, “If you ask whether Chinese people are capable of innovating, the answer is that we have hundreds or maybe thousands of them innovating every day in Silicon Valley. But to innovate you need a degree of chaos, so the real question is, How much chaos is China willing to accept?”
Continue reading: http://tocqueville.com/insights/discover-ignorance/
