What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable (Edge Question Series) 0061214957, 9780061214950

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Contents
Preface: The Edge Question
Acknowledgments
Introduction
We Have No Souls
The Rejection of Soul
The Evolution of Evil
The Differences Between Humans and Nonhumans Are Quantitative, Not Qualitative
Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments
The Genetic Basis of Human Behavior
Marionettes on Genetic Strings
Francis Crick’s Dangerous Idea
Being Alone in the Universe
Life as an Agent of Energy Dispersal
We Are Entirely Alone
Science May Be Running Out of Control
Why I Hope the Standard Model Is Wrong About Why There Is More Matter Than Antimatter
The Idea That We Understand Plutonium
The Idea That We Should All Share Our Most Dangerous Ideas
The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous
The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost
Think Outside the Kyoto Box
Our Planet Is Not in Peril
The Effect of Art Can’t Be Controlled or Anticipated
A “Grand Narrative”
Our Universal Moral Grammar's Immunity to Religion
Bertrand Russell’s Dangerous Idea
Hodgepodge Morality
We Will Understand the Origin of Life Within the Next Five Years
Understanding Molecular Biology Without Discovering the Origins of Life
The Problem with Super Mirrors
Cyberdisinhibition
Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies
What Are People Well Informed About in the Information Age?
More Anonymity Is Good
A New Golden Age of Medicine
Using Medications to Change Personality
Drugs May Change the Patterns of Human Love
A Marriage Option for All
Choosing the Sex of One's Child
The Idea of Ideas
The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe
The World May Be Fundamentally Inexplicable
The “Landscape”
Seeing Darwin in the Light of Einstein; Seeing Einstein in the Light of Darwin
The Multiverse
What Twentieth-Century Physics Says About the World Might Be True
Its a Matter of Time
A Radical Re-evaluation of the Character of Time
It’s OK Not to Know Everything
The End of Insight
When Will the Internet Become Aware of Itself?
Democratizing Access to the Means of Invention
Mind Is a Universally Distributed Quality
The Forbidden Fruit Intuition
The Posterior Probability of Any Particular God Is Pretty Small
Science Must Destroy Religion
The Self Is a Conceptual Chimera
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Science as Just Another Religion
This Is All There Is
A Science of the Divine?
Science Will Never Silence God
Religion Is the Hope That Is Missing in Science
Myths and Fairy Tales Are Not True
Parental Licensure
Zero Parental Influence
A Cacophony of “Controversy”
Applied History
Tribal Peoples Often Damage Their Environments and Make War
Nothing
Everything Is Pointless
There Aren’t Enough Minds to House the Population Explosion of Memes
Unspeakable Ideas
Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an All-Too-Practical Sense
Navigating by New Scientific Principles
A Political System Based on Empathy
Social Relativity
A Spoon Is Like a Headache
Projection of the Longevity Curve
The Near-Term Inevitability of Radical Life Extension and Expansion
The Domestication of Biotechnology
Public Engagement in Science and Technology
Suppose Faulkner Was Right?
What If the Unknown Becomes Known and Is Not Replaced with a New Unknown?
Where Goods Cross Frontiers, Armies Won’t
Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution
The Free Market
Modern Science Is a Product of Biology
No More Teacher's Dirty Looks
We Are All Virtual
Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox
Simulation Versus Authenticity
Culture Is Natural
The Human Brain Is a Cultural Artifact
Free Will Is Exercised Unconsciously
Free Will Is Going Away
The Limits of Introspection
What We Know May Not Change Us
Telling More Than We Can Know
The Quick-Thinking Zombies Inside Us
The Banality of Evil, the Banality of Heroism
Is the West Already on a Downhill Course?
Technology Can Untie the United States
Democracy May Be on Its Way Out
Marx Was Right: The State Will Evaporate
Following Sisyphus
How Can I Trust, in the Face of So Many Unknowables?
A Twenty-Four-Hour Period of Absolute Solitude
Afterword