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Great Minds Don't Think Alike: Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality, and the Human
Does technology change who we are, and if so, in what ways? Can humanity transcend physical bodies and spaces? Will AI and genetic engineering help us reach new heights or will they unleash dystopias? How do we face mortality, our own and that of our warming planet? Questions like these―which are only growing more urgent―can be answered only by drawing on different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. They challenge us to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities and bring together perspectives that are too often kept apart.
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today. Convened and moderated by the physicist and author Marcelo Gleiser, these public dialogues model constructive engagement between the sciences and the humanities―and show why intellectual cooperation is necessary to shape our collective future.
Contributors include David Chalmers and Antonio Damasio; Sean Carroll and B. Alan Wallace; Patricia Churchland and Jill Tarter; Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman; Jimena Canales and Paul Davies; Ed Boyden and Mark O’Connell; Elizabeth Kolbert and Siddhartha Mukherjee; Jeremy DeSilva, David Grinspoon, and Tasneem Zehra Husain.
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today. Convened and moderated by the physicist and author Marcelo Gleiser, these public dialogues model constructive engagement between the sciences and the humanities―and show why intellectual cooperation is necessary to shape our collective future.
Contributors include David Chalmers and Antonio Damasio; Sean Carroll and B. Alan Wallace; Patricia Churchland and Jill Tarter; Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman; Jimena Canales and Paul Davies; Ed Boyden and Mark O’Connell; Elizabeth Kolbert and Siddhartha Mukherjee; Jeremy DeSilva, David Grinspoon, and Tasneem Zehra Husain.
280 pages, Paperback
Published February 8, 2022
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January 30, 2022
It is difficult for me, having reviewed over a thousand works of nonfiction, to simply trust what I read. For me to give a book carte blanche to take me wherever it wants to go, is, to be polite, rare. But Great Minds Don't Think Alike achieves it with ease. It is a delight, an education, an intellectual theme park where ideas come at the reader out of nowhere, challenging, affirming and inspiring new thoughts. It is a grand experience rolled into eight evenings of pairing off acknowledged experts in seemingly unrelated fields, and letting them go at it.
A philosopher debates an astronomer. A physicist debates an Eastern religions expert. The host (and author), physicist Marcelo Gleiser, is no lightweight either. His own questions and answers are right up to snuff, pushing the conversation to new heights, and getting involved and intertwined in three way conversations. Unlike so many moderators who just show up and read questions off index cards, Gleiser becomes more and more active as the debates roll on (although there are two or three core ideas he keeps repeating everywhere he goes).
It was not obvious how to review a book with eight different debates. To give readers a proper flavor, I decided to provide highlights from each one. So imagine some mind-bending from the people who do it for a living:
1. Consciousness
Philosopher David Chalmers grabs the high road right out of the box, claiming philosophy, the original science, nurtured and spun off all the other sciences: "The physics startup is really quite successful," he beams. Before that it was psychology, linguistics, and economics. Now he hopes to do it for consciousness, which still seems hooked up to philosophy. (Readers will soon understand why.)
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio takes the conversation directly into consciousness, and how science is nowhere close to mastering its basic functionality, let alone nuances. The two spend a lot time on reductionism, which in some uses, tries to explain the complex in a simple sentence. Here, they agree we cannot reduce consciousness to just neurons. Living organisms have far more to account for than that.
Chalmers goes further, saying "Reductionism is of course one of these very ambiguous terms that people mostly use to define views that they are opposed to." To which Damasio simply says "Right." So that's the view from the scientist side.
But from the layman's side, reductionism is also highly damaging, reducing complexity to incorrect simplicity. We see this in healthcare, where simplistic diagnoses lead to negligent, damaging outcomes. It can be a hugely negative force when scientists don't have all the facts, connections and side effects mastered. And they don't. At all (as readers will soon see as well).
This debate gets hung up in the very definition of consciousness, proving how infirm and insecure our grasp of the whole concept is. What is it that defines consciousness? Is it self awareness? Or subjective experience? How many other species can be said to have it? All or most mammals? Fish?
How can we hope to replicate consciousness when we can't even define it? Can Artificial intelligence (AI) replicate it, even just in theory? Damasio says that AI and human intelligence are different things, and "Only by chance will the natural and artificial coincide in terms of structure, design, or operating capacity." AI is not a replacement for consciousness. This comes up in most of the debates.
Both men agree on most issues in this debate, which is a little disappointing. They know each other's work and each other's fields, and acknowledge the same strengths and weaknesses. Philosophy and neuroscience appear to be on close wavelengths.
If I had to rank them, this debate would be my favorite of the eight.
2. Reality
Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace quickly turns the "other intelligence life in the universe" trope into a local problem: "Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? My answer is yeah - Asia! With our ethnocentric biases, we in the West have been overlooking discoveries made in the East over the entire course of recorded human history...But now, in the twenty-first century, it is inexcusable to ignore the wisdom of whole civilizations."
In the course of the conversation, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll contributes out of left field that all mammals produce one and a half billion heartbeats in their lifetimes. For those with really fast heartbeats (eg. mice), their lifespan is shorter. For those with leisurely rates (eg. elephants), it is longer. Man, of course has taken himself out of the system, by employing medicines, focused diets and a variety of surgeries and therapies to double his total number of heartbeats. So instead of living for 40 years as he used to, the current number is about 80, COVID-19 notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, Wallace contributes that despite the certainties of astrophysics, numerous physicists have continued to posit a greater force that designed it all. Right up to Einstein.
He also says "We are more ignorant about consciousness than about distant galaxies that formed ten billion years ago, more ignorant about consciousness than we are about the inner nucleus of an atom. Why? Because we're not looking."
He then claims "the notion that consciousness emerges from the chemicals and electricity in the brain is an expression of neuro-mythology...It's magical thinking, really." Them's fightin' words.
Sean Carroll doesn't take the bait, but calmly responds that of course it is difficult to understand, but "That doesn't seem to me to mean that we need to invoke new stuff, outside the laws of physics." He then proposes a totally different concept: What if the brain isn't a hard drive, but a keyboard, accessing data from the mind? That explains nothing, and a lot.
One last shot at science comes from Carroll who admits "Neuroscientists don't care about behavior, they look at signalling and its effect." That will come as a surprise, and raise a lot of questions about science itself. And why it understands so little about consciousness.
3. Intelligence
Put an astronomer, Jill Tarter, together with a philosopher, Patricia Churchland, and the discussion ranges far and wide - but gravitates to AI. They both agree we know essentially nothing about neural networks, that the most sophisticated AI system is less capable of problem solving than a raven is, and that we keep learning that neurons are more complex and sophisticated than the simple switches we have always taken them to be. Building AI systems to mimic the brain must therefore fail, as we still have no idea how human minds do something as simple as pulling up a memory. Remembering your first kiss - comes right back when you want it, and we have no idea how, Churchland says.
Meanwhile, science's gargantuan efforts to find intelligent life in the universe is all but laughable. Astronomers and physicists work at different projects, to say, detect laser beams (which do not occur in nature) or examine the skies for evidence of manipulation. But, Tarter says: "If you take the nine-dimensional volume that we need to search for signals and you set that volume equal to the volume of the earth's oceans, to date we have sampled one glass, one twelve ounce glass, of the earth's oceans."
4. Spirituality
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist. Among other works, she has written a book with the delightful title: Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
Alan Lightman is a physicist and also a novelist. He was the first person to receive dual appointments in both the sciences and the humanities at MIT.
The conversation drifted towards a unified theory of everything and whether anything like that is even possible. That's when Gleiser got really involved.
Gleiser "wrote a whole book called The Island of Knowledge, which is exactly about this. The fact is that there is no way you can actually get to a final theory of everything because you'll never know where you are in the big scheme of things." There's always something more to discover and the discovery of a new particle would throw the whole thing off.
This debate moved as well as any of them, but it was disappointing to me because of its treatment of religion. It's fine and even desirable to contrast science and religion (and spirituality) and how God fits in. The problem is it only uses God and not god. There are numerous religions, and most have origin myths that are totally believed by followers, as well as gods that have more or less to do with nature, daily life, the universe and everything. But Goldstein and Lightman seem to be stuck with their god, the one they were raised on. Their answers were therefore tainted and of little value, unless of course, like them, you only consider the Abrahamic god to be the true and only God. The only one worth arguing about. That the previous debate railed against precisely this prejudice is not raised here.
5. Time
The debate over time featured science historian Jimena Canales and physicist Paul Davies. Canales focused on the infamous meeting where Bergson confronted Einstein (The philosopher Bergson had such renown he was holding up a Nobel prize for relativity because he didn't believe it). This was where the sciences and the humanities parted ways, and there has been little to bridge the gap since.
Time is what we make it into. Leo Buscaglia said "Man invented time, and now he runs by it." Our time began at the big bang, when there there was something measurable. Asking about time before the big bang is, according to Stephen Hawking, like asking what is north of the North Pole. The answer is nothing. Time does not flow, it just is.
You can travel into the future by moving faster than life on Earth, but you can't travel back in time to when you left or before. We are always changing, not time. Our core personalities are changing, not static, but we foist the changes onto time. But time is just an innocent bystander in our changes. In Davies' terms: "The times at each point in space are relative to a unique reference frame, but it's different from the reference frame at another cosmic location over there. But wherever the observers are located, as long as they are in the reference frame for which the cosmic microwave background is isotropic in that frame at that location, they will agree with other cosmic observers on statements like 'the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago.'"
He also cites John Wheeler, saying "If you ask an atom the direction of time, it will laugh in your face." It's not about time, its about behavior. Our solar-based time is meaningless to the universe.
6. Transhumanism
Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist says "To map one human brain would require a stack of hard drives reaching into outer space." Consciousness remains a mystery. How can we talk of transhumanism - preserving our minds and personalities in some AI system - when we know nearly nothing about how a personality even works?
Journalist and author Mark O'Connell quotes St. Augustine in 500 AD, describing how Christians would merge with God and be far more than mere humans, living forever: "Think how beautiful, how certain, how unerring, how easily acquired this knowledge and what a body too we shall have. A body utterly subject to our spirit and one kept alive by Spirit that there will be no need of any other food." (City of God) This is a very old idea then, making tech seem an extension of religion.
St Augustine's promise matches almost exactly to what Ray Kurzweil promises with The Singularity. It is due in 2045, he predicts (and is actively working towards). The differences are that in The Singularity, you will upload the data from your brain to some massive AI system that will somehow allow you to continue "living" through it. The other difference is that The Singularity is at least possible, O'Connell says. Religious promises of eternal life, merging wth a god and living in paradise forever have failed to produce every time, as religions have disappeared, and their gods with them.
Interestingly, Kurzweil does not appreciate or countenance the religious connection at all (and thereby agreeing with most transhumanists, apparently), and O'Connell doesn't insist on it either. He merely points it out.
Far too briefly, the three participants touched on the issue of who gets to do this, to transcend the human body and live forever. The answer of course, is billionaires, currently signing up for for-profit space tourism that no one else can afford. What the debaters didn't get to was what a horrible place Earth would be if only annoying billionaires could live forever. The world would never be rid of the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel, who when asked about rising inequality, answered that the greatest inequality is between living people and dead people, according to O'Connell. To which Gleiser, who is never at a loss for words, could only respond: "Wow." Before we head much farther towards The Singularity, this issue needs to be considered.
But we are probably backing into transhumanism regardless. Boyden points to replacement parts like cochlear implants and pacemakers, while Gleiser repeats his story of the cellphone being a critical extension of Man. Leaving it home by mistake is (emotionally) disastrous for many. And science has never backed away from any challenge, no matter how destructive it was.
7. Longevity
In another interesting matchup, bestselling environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert sat in conversation with medical research Doctor Siddhartha (Sid) Mukerjee.
The conversation quickly fell to why individuals will not take any steps to save the planet, despite knowing with certainty they can help. Kolbert cited things like shorter showers, fewer single serving food purchases, and less meat. But people just won't do it. And yet even giant corporations are starting to come around to reducing waste, practically shaming their customers. It is bizarre.
Then it's quickly back to gene manipulation, where it turns out that human cells do not like it when someone tries to edit DNA. "When that happens, the consequences are usually quite severe. Cancer is one of the major consequences - a mutation that eventually causes cancer," Mukerjee says. Nonetheless, it is full speed ahead, as scientists employ basic human bacteria, which are already equipped with gene editing capabilities (for self defense), to make the changes they want in stem cells that produce sperm and eggs. This is known as CRISPR. It has the potential to produce disease-immune babies. But also cause them cancer.
On cloning as a solution, Mukerjee's main contribution is a thought experiment, or nightmare depending on your temperament, that goes: what if we could clone a person, and give them a Go Pro of all the important events in the sponsor's life? They could watch and absorb the memories, carrying them forward.
To which Kolbert replies, she has clones at home: twins. They are completely different personalities and totally independent beings. If you gave them a Go Pro to study the important events in their sponsor's life, they couldn't be bothered. They have their own lives to live.
But Mukerjee, while admitting this view is dystopic, adds that yesterday's dystopia is tomorrow's old news.
8. Being Human
This debate featured three scientists: Tasneem Husain, who specializes in mathematics and the history of science, Jerry DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist, and David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist.
DeSilva describes the missing link as a nonissue; he says they have many links and a good picture of Man's evolution and development. The first ape to walk upright was Ardipithecus, who lived 4-7 million years ago. "What differs are our smile and the way we walk. It really boils down to that," he says.
It was two million years before the various homo species started appearing. DeSilva noted that as Man develops, brains have been getting smaller, not larger.
He lectures at length on bipedalism, the rare (among mammals) ability to live upright (as opposed just standing tall on occasion). It gives Man the ability use his arms and hands like no other mammal, to use tools and weapons, carry things, and so on. What it has taken from Man is speed and agility. People are slow. He says Husain Bolt couldn't catch a rabbit. Bolt's top speed is all of 28 miles per hour.
And people fall. They stumble, they trip and they fall - a lot. Little holes can do them in. Balance is an issue for people and it grows worse with age. Everything has a cost and bipedalism is no exception.
Grinspoon takes a more galactic view: "What we see here is an example of a species that's really good at solving local survival problems and using it to extend its ability to do so, but in so doing has inadvertently created a global change that they've sort of stumbled into. That's what I call the Anthropocene dilemma, where our influence exceeds the scale of our agency, our sense of control." This is a very generous (and naive ) assessment to me. I think it's actually more like what Oxford economist Paul Collier said: "We are not here to serve nature. Nature is here to serve us." And therein lies the problem.
Grinspoon later says about the same thing, he has a wish for the "ceasing our vandalism of the climate," which is a nice turn of phrase.
Tasneem Husain exhibited the biggest epic fail of all the debates. She spent her presentation segment extolling the virtues of storytelling throughout history. It's a unique human trait to pass on important data by incorporating it in a story. Yet when an audience questioner asked about employing storytelling to better communicate the climate emergency, her longwinded answer ignored storytelling and focused on science communication, whatever that means. If it's anything like what we have seen to date, don't waste your time.
Overall, aside from the general level of thoughtfulness and ideas, what strikes me most about Great Minds Don't Think Alike is the appreciation for the connectivity of everything. While each guest has focused expertise, many of them have thoroughly subsumed the state of the art in other disciplines and can debate other experts at their level. It is refreshing to see they are not one-trick ponies, so immersed in their own specialized fields that they know nothing else and cannot see the effects and consequences elsewhere. Quite the opposite. Numerous times, they cite their "opponent's" work, not to criticize, but to build their own case. They are open, activist experts, and that's how it should be if we are ever to get anywhere.
So I learned. And I liked it.
David Wineb
A philosopher debates an astronomer. A physicist debates an Eastern religions expert. The host (and author), physicist Marcelo Gleiser, is no lightweight either. His own questions and answers are right up to snuff, pushing the conversation to new heights, and getting involved and intertwined in three way conversations. Unlike so many moderators who just show up and read questions off index cards, Gleiser becomes more and more active as the debates roll on (although there are two or three core ideas he keeps repeating everywhere he goes).
It was not obvious how to review a book with eight different debates. To give readers a proper flavor, I decided to provide highlights from each one. So imagine some mind-bending from the people who do it for a living:
1. Consciousness
Philosopher David Chalmers grabs the high road right out of the box, claiming philosophy, the original science, nurtured and spun off all the other sciences: "The physics startup is really quite successful," he beams. Before that it was psychology, linguistics, and economics. Now he hopes to do it for consciousness, which still seems hooked up to philosophy. (Readers will soon understand why.)
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio takes the conversation directly into consciousness, and how science is nowhere close to mastering its basic functionality, let alone nuances. The two spend a lot time on reductionism, which in some uses, tries to explain the complex in a simple sentence. Here, they agree we cannot reduce consciousness to just neurons. Living organisms have far more to account for than that.
Chalmers goes further, saying "Reductionism is of course one of these very ambiguous terms that people mostly use to define views that they are opposed to." To which Damasio simply says "Right." So that's the view from the scientist side.
But from the layman's side, reductionism is also highly damaging, reducing complexity to incorrect simplicity. We see this in healthcare, where simplistic diagnoses lead to negligent, damaging outcomes. It can be a hugely negative force when scientists don't have all the facts, connections and side effects mastered. And they don't. At all (as readers will soon see as well).
This debate gets hung up in the very definition of consciousness, proving how infirm and insecure our grasp of the whole concept is. What is it that defines consciousness? Is it self awareness? Or subjective experience? How many other species can be said to have it? All or most mammals? Fish?
How can we hope to replicate consciousness when we can't even define it? Can Artificial intelligence (AI) replicate it, even just in theory? Damasio says that AI and human intelligence are different things, and "Only by chance will the natural and artificial coincide in terms of structure, design, or operating capacity." AI is not a replacement for consciousness. This comes up in most of the debates.
Both men agree on most issues in this debate, which is a little disappointing. They know each other's work and each other's fields, and acknowledge the same strengths and weaknesses. Philosophy and neuroscience appear to be on close wavelengths.
If I had to rank them, this debate would be my favorite of the eight.
2. Reality
Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace quickly turns the "other intelligence life in the universe" trope into a local problem: "Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? My answer is yeah - Asia! With our ethnocentric biases, we in the West have been overlooking discoveries made in the East over the entire course of recorded human history...But now, in the twenty-first century, it is inexcusable to ignore the wisdom of whole civilizations."
In the course of the conversation, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll contributes out of left field that all mammals produce one and a half billion heartbeats in their lifetimes. For those with really fast heartbeats (eg. mice), their lifespan is shorter. For those with leisurely rates (eg. elephants), it is longer. Man, of course has taken himself out of the system, by employing medicines, focused diets and a variety of surgeries and therapies to double his total number of heartbeats. So instead of living for 40 years as he used to, the current number is about 80, COVID-19 notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, Wallace contributes that despite the certainties of astrophysics, numerous physicists have continued to posit a greater force that designed it all. Right up to Einstein.
He also says "We are more ignorant about consciousness than about distant galaxies that formed ten billion years ago, more ignorant about consciousness than we are about the inner nucleus of an atom. Why? Because we're not looking."
He then claims "the notion that consciousness emerges from the chemicals and electricity in the brain is an expression of neuro-mythology...It's magical thinking, really." Them's fightin' words.
Sean Carroll doesn't take the bait, but calmly responds that of course it is difficult to understand, but "That doesn't seem to me to mean that we need to invoke new stuff, outside the laws of physics." He then proposes a totally different concept: What if the brain isn't a hard drive, but a keyboard, accessing data from the mind? That explains nothing, and a lot.
One last shot at science comes from Carroll who admits "Neuroscientists don't care about behavior, they look at signalling and its effect." That will come as a surprise, and raise a lot of questions about science itself. And why it understands so little about consciousness.
3. Intelligence
Put an astronomer, Jill Tarter, together with a philosopher, Patricia Churchland, and the discussion ranges far and wide - but gravitates to AI. They both agree we know essentially nothing about neural networks, that the most sophisticated AI system is less capable of problem solving than a raven is, and that we keep learning that neurons are more complex and sophisticated than the simple switches we have always taken them to be. Building AI systems to mimic the brain must therefore fail, as we still have no idea how human minds do something as simple as pulling up a memory. Remembering your first kiss - comes right back when you want it, and we have no idea how, Churchland says.
Meanwhile, science's gargantuan efforts to find intelligent life in the universe is all but laughable. Astronomers and physicists work at different projects, to say, detect laser beams (which do not occur in nature) or examine the skies for evidence of manipulation. But, Tarter says: "If you take the nine-dimensional volume that we need to search for signals and you set that volume equal to the volume of the earth's oceans, to date we have sampled one glass, one twelve ounce glass, of the earth's oceans."
4. Spirituality
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist. Among other works, she has written a book with the delightful title: Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
Alan Lightman is a physicist and also a novelist. He was the first person to receive dual appointments in both the sciences and the humanities at MIT.
The conversation drifted towards a unified theory of everything and whether anything like that is even possible. That's when Gleiser got really involved.
Gleiser "wrote a whole book called The Island of Knowledge, which is exactly about this. The fact is that there is no way you can actually get to a final theory of everything because you'll never know where you are in the big scheme of things." There's always something more to discover and the discovery of a new particle would throw the whole thing off.
This debate moved as well as any of them, but it was disappointing to me because of its treatment of religion. It's fine and even desirable to contrast science and religion (and spirituality) and how God fits in. The problem is it only uses God and not god. There are numerous religions, and most have origin myths that are totally believed by followers, as well as gods that have more or less to do with nature, daily life, the universe and everything. But Goldstein and Lightman seem to be stuck with their god, the one they were raised on. Their answers were therefore tainted and of little value, unless of course, like them, you only consider the Abrahamic god to be the true and only God. The only one worth arguing about. That the previous debate railed against precisely this prejudice is not raised here.
5. Time
The debate over time featured science historian Jimena Canales and physicist Paul Davies. Canales focused on the infamous meeting where Bergson confronted Einstein (The philosopher Bergson had such renown he was holding up a Nobel prize for relativity because he didn't believe it). This was where the sciences and the humanities parted ways, and there has been little to bridge the gap since.
Time is what we make it into. Leo Buscaglia said "Man invented time, and now he runs by it." Our time began at the big bang, when there there was something measurable. Asking about time before the big bang is, according to Stephen Hawking, like asking what is north of the North Pole. The answer is nothing. Time does not flow, it just is.
You can travel into the future by moving faster than life on Earth, but you can't travel back in time to when you left or before. We are always changing, not time. Our core personalities are changing, not static, but we foist the changes onto time. But time is just an innocent bystander in our changes. In Davies' terms: "The times at each point in space are relative to a unique reference frame, but it's different from the reference frame at another cosmic location over there. But wherever the observers are located, as long as they are in the reference frame for which the cosmic microwave background is isotropic in that frame at that location, they will agree with other cosmic observers on statements like 'the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago.'"
He also cites John Wheeler, saying "If you ask an atom the direction of time, it will laugh in your face." It's not about time, its about behavior. Our solar-based time is meaningless to the universe.
6. Transhumanism
Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist says "To map one human brain would require a stack of hard drives reaching into outer space." Consciousness remains a mystery. How can we talk of transhumanism - preserving our minds and personalities in some AI system - when we know nearly nothing about how a personality even works?
Journalist and author Mark O'Connell quotes St. Augustine in 500 AD, describing how Christians would merge with God and be far more than mere humans, living forever: "Think how beautiful, how certain, how unerring, how easily acquired this knowledge and what a body too we shall have. A body utterly subject to our spirit and one kept alive by Spirit that there will be no need of any other food." (City of God) This is a very old idea then, making tech seem an extension of religion.
St Augustine's promise matches almost exactly to what Ray Kurzweil promises with The Singularity. It is due in 2045, he predicts (and is actively working towards). The differences are that in The Singularity, you will upload the data from your brain to some massive AI system that will somehow allow you to continue "living" through it. The other difference is that The Singularity is at least possible, O'Connell says. Religious promises of eternal life, merging wth a god and living in paradise forever have failed to produce every time, as religions have disappeared, and their gods with them.
Interestingly, Kurzweil does not appreciate or countenance the religious connection at all (and thereby agreeing with most transhumanists, apparently), and O'Connell doesn't insist on it either. He merely points it out.
Far too briefly, the three participants touched on the issue of who gets to do this, to transcend the human body and live forever. The answer of course, is billionaires, currently signing up for for-profit space tourism that no one else can afford. What the debaters didn't get to was what a horrible place Earth would be if only annoying billionaires could live forever. The world would never be rid of the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel, who when asked about rising inequality, answered that the greatest inequality is between living people and dead people, according to O'Connell. To which Gleiser, who is never at a loss for words, could only respond: "Wow." Before we head much farther towards The Singularity, this issue needs to be considered.
But we are probably backing into transhumanism regardless. Boyden points to replacement parts like cochlear implants and pacemakers, while Gleiser repeats his story of the cellphone being a critical extension of Man. Leaving it home by mistake is (emotionally) disastrous for many. And science has never backed away from any challenge, no matter how destructive it was.
7. Longevity
In another interesting matchup, bestselling environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert sat in conversation with medical research Doctor Siddhartha (Sid) Mukerjee.
The conversation quickly fell to why individuals will not take any steps to save the planet, despite knowing with certainty they can help. Kolbert cited things like shorter showers, fewer single serving food purchases, and less meat. But people just won't do it. And yet even giant corporations are starting to come around to reducing waste, practically shaming their customers. It is bizarre.
Then it's quickly back to gene manipulation, where it turns out that human cells do not like it when someone tries to edit DNA. "When that happens, the consequences are usually quite severe. Cancer is one of the major consequences - a mutation that eventually causes cancer," Mukerjee says. Nonetheless, it is full speed ahead, as scientists employ basic human bacteria, which are already equipped with gene editing capabilities (for self defense), to make the changes they want in stem cells that produce sperm and eggs. This is known as CRISPR. It has the potential to produce disease-immune babies. But also cause them cancer.
On cloning as a solution, Mukerjee's main contribution is a thought experiment, or nightmare depending on your temperament, that goes: what if we could clone a person, and give them a Go Pro of all the important events in the sponsor's life? They could watch and absorb the memories, carrying them forward.
To which Kolbert replies, she has clones at home: twins. They are completely different personalities and totally independent beings. If you gave them a Go Pro to study the important events in their sponsor's life, they couldn't be bothered. They have their own lives to live.
But Mukerjee, while admitting this view is dystopic, adds that yesterday's dystopia is tomorrow's old news.
8. Being Human
This debate featured three scientists: Tasneem Husain, who specializes in mathematics and the history of science, Jerry DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist, and David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist.
DeSilva describes the missing link as a nonissue; he says they have many links and a good picture of Man's evolution and development. The first ape to walk upright was Ardipithecus, who lived 4-7 million years ago. "What differs are our smile and the way we walk. It really boils down to that," he says.
It was two million years before the various homo species started appearing. DeSilva noted that as Man develops, brains have been getting smaller, not larger.
He lectures at length on bipedalism, the rare (among mammals) ability to live upright (as opposed just standing tall on occasion). It gives Man the ability use his arms and hands like no other mammal, to use tools and weapons, carry things, and so on. What it has taken from Man is speed and agility. People are slow. He says Husain Bolt couldn't catch a rabbit. Bolt's top speed is all of 28 miles per hour.
And people fall. They stumble, they trip and they fall - a lot. Little holes can do them in. Balance is an issue for people and it grows worse with age. Everything has a cost and bipedalism is no exception.
Grinspoon takes a more galactic view: "What we see here is an example of a species that's really good at solving local survival problems and using it to extend its ability to do so, but in so doing has inadvertently created a global change that they've sort of stumbled into. That's what I call the Anthropocene dilemma, where our influence exceeds the scale of our agency, our sense of control." This is a very generous (and naive ) assessment to me. I think it's actually more like what Oxford economist Paul Collier said: "We are not here to serve nature. Nature is here to serve us." And therein lies the problem.
Grinspoon later says about the same thing, he has a wish for the "ceasing our vandalism of the climate," which is a nice turn of phrase.
Tasneem Husain exhibited the biggest epic fail of all the debates. She spent her presentation segment extolling the virtues of storytelling throughout history. It's a unique human trait to pass on important data by incorporating it in a story. Yet when an audience questioner asked about employing storytelling to better communicate the climate emergency, her longwinded answer ignored storytelling and focused on science communication, whatever that means. If it's anything like what we have seen to date, don't waste your time.
Overall, aside from the general level of thoughtfulness and ideas, what strikes me most about Great Minds Don't Think Alike is the appreciation for the connectivity of everything. While each guest has focused expertise, many of them have thoroughly subsumed the state of the art in other disciplines and can debate other experts at their level. It is refreshing to see they are not one-trick ponies, so immersed in their own specialized fields that they know nothing else and cannot see the effects and consequences elsewhere. Quite the opposite. Numerous times, they cite their "opponent's" work, not to criticize, but to build their own case. They are open, activist experts, and that's how it should be if we are ever to get anywhere.
So I learned. And I liked it.
David Wineb
February 11, 2022
Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an arc to this book.
I gave this book two stars for a few reasons. Firstly this book would have been more engaging and useful as a docuseries or podcast. As the book consists of written down conversations I often found that the speakers strayed from the topic at hand and though these added stories and evidence may have seemed useful in conversation for it to be successful in book format it needed to be concise. Secondly I was slightly mislead by the title. I assumed the book would look at why minds don’t think alike but in fact it was people who had opposing views discussing a topic. The first few conversations were not the strongest which made it hard to want to pick the book up but the conversation on trans humanism and the conversation on planetary and evolutionary continuation were the strongest and the most interesting.
I gave this book two stars for a few reasons. Firstly this book would have been more engaging and useful as a docuseries or podcast. As the book consists of written down conversations I often found that the speakers strayed from the topic at hand and though these added stories and evidence may have seemed useful in conversation for it to be successful in book format it needed to be concise. Secondly I was slightly mislead by the title. I assumed the book would look at why minds don’t think alike but in fact it was people who had opposing views discussing a topic. The first few conversations were not the strongest which made it hard to want to pick the book up but the conversation on trans humanism and the conversation on planetary and evolutionary continuation were the strongest and the most interesting.
January 3, 2022
Thoughtful and insightful perspectives on some challenging questions of life
Is AI going to make humans obsolete? Or might we adopt AI into our own bodies and become something a bit more than human? What does it mean to be human anyway? What makes us different from animals; are they conscious, or is that just a human characteristic? What about other intelligent life? Does it exist elsewhere in the universe? Is there another realm entirely beyond the physical? These are the kinds of tough questions everyone has thought about at one time or another. Science generally takes a different approach to addressing them than does philosophy or other liberal arts, but there are smart minds in all those fields, so Marcelo Gleiser convened a series of dialogues between thinkers with different perspectives to address eight of the questions that all of us have pondered but none of us has really been able to answer.
Some reviewers have described these as “debates”, but there is little outright disagreement among the speakers. For the most part I would call their perspectives complementary, giving me a picture that was bigger and more nuanced than before rather than convincing me one way or the other. For example, neither of the participants in the dialogue on The Nature of Spirituality: A Conversation on Science and Religion has traditional religious beliefs, but I found Alan Lightman’s description of a transcendent experience, “the immediate and vital experience of being connected to something larger than ourselves”, to be powerful and convincing. His partner in the dialogue, Rebecca Goldstein, gave a wonderful example of this when she described seeing a rainbow in the company of a group of baboons.
Some of my favorite thinkers were in the list, like Rebecca Goldstein, Antonio Damasio, David Chalmers, and Alan Lightman. What I liked best, though, was meeting some new thinkers and their ideas. One of my favorite dialogues was Cyborgs, Futurists, and Transhumans, where I met Mark O’Connell. At first my reaction was that a science fiction author would have been a better choice for this dialogue, but I was drawn into O’Connell’s ideas. This dialogue was the best blend of science and philosophy in the book. I met another impressive mind in the closing dialogue (or trilogue (?), since there were three participants), where David Grinspoon’s vision of a “terra sapiens” in which we integrate our own activities with natural global cycles gave a nice conclusion to the book.
These are essentially the transcripts of talks given at several locations and times. If it were a traditional book, the speakers or editors would probably have finetuned the talks to produce smoother prose. There were a few places where the ideas could have been expressed a bit more clearly (although even more places where the speakers were extremely articulate and even highly entertaining). In addition, if I were the editor I might have suggested to some of the scientists that they did not need to be quite so sophisticated in describing the science behind their thinking and they should explain some of their references, like Olbers’ paradox.
None of those small imperfections should dissuade you from reading the book, though. Great minds may not think alike, but I believe most readers will think alike and agree that this thoughtful, insightful book is one they are glad they have read.
I received an advance review copy of this book from Edelweiss and the publisher.
Is AI going to make humans obsolete? Or might we adopt AI into our own bodies and become something a bit more than human? What does it mean to be human anyway? What makes us different from animals; are they conscious, or is that just a human characteristic? What about other intelligent life? Does it exist elsewhere in the universe? Is there another realm entirely beyond the physical? These are the kinds of tough questions everyone has thought about at one time or another. Science generally takes a different approach to addressing them than does philosophy or other liberal arts, but there are smart minds in all those fields, so Marcelo Gleiser convened a series of dialogues between thinkers with different perspectives to address eight of the questions that all of us have pondered but none of us has really been able to answer.
Some reviewers have described these as “debates”, but there is little outright disagreement among the speakers. For the most part I would call their perspectives complementary, giving me a picture that was bigger and more nuanced than before rather than convincing me one way or the other. For example, neither of the participants in the dialogue on The Nature of Spirituality: A Conversation on Science and Religion has traditional religious beliefs, but I found Alan Lightman’s description of a transcendent experience, “the immediate and vital experience of being connected to something larger than ourselves”, to be powerful and convincing. His partner in the dialogue, Rebecca Goldstein, gave a wonderful example of this when she described seeing a rainbow in the company of a group of baboons.
Some of my favorite thinkers were in the list, like Rebecca Goldstein, Antonio Damasio, David Chalmers, and Alan Lightman. What I liked best, though, was meeting some new thinkers and their ideas. One of my favorite dialogues was Cyborgs, Futurists, and Transhumans, where I met Mark O’Connell. At first my reaction was that a science fiction author would have been a better choice for this dialogue, but I was drawn into O’Connell’s ideas. This dialogue was the best blend of science and philosophy in the book. I met another impressive mind in the closing dialogue (or trilogue (?), since there were three participants), where David Grinspoon’s vision of a “terra sapiens” in which we integrate our own activities with natural global cycles gave a nice conclusion to the book.
These are essentially the transcripts of talks given at several locations and times. If it were a traditional book, the speakers or editors would probably have finetuned the talks to produce smoother prose. There were a few places where the ideas could have been expressed a bit more clearly (although even more places where the speakers were extremely articulate and even highly entertaining). In addition, if I were the editor I might have suggested to some of the scientists that they did not need to be quite so sophisticated in describing the science behind their thinking and they should explain some of their references, like Olbers’ paradox.
None of those small imperfections should dissuade you from reading the book, though. Great minds may not think alike, but I believe most readers will think alike and agree that this thoughtful, insightful book is one they are glad they have read.
I received an advance review copy of this book from Edelweiss and the publisher.
December 9, 2023
22 August 2023
3 stars!
*Technically finished up to page 202*
Again, another book I read for college for my Faith and Science class. While I didn't get around to finishing it, I got most of the way through it.
It was far from the best book. In fact, I actually found it rather boring; it really just wasn't for me, which is unfortunate as I was looking forward to it. :(
I ended up giving it 3 stars instead of anything lower since it really wasn't bad, but the writing style just wasn't a match for me. Nonetheless, for a text for a class about the connections between religions and science (the two cultures as C. P. Snow would call it), it was a great match for the class. Ultimately, I guess I gave it 3 stars because I didn't have it in me to give it anything less. :\
3 stars!
~~~~~
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Happy Reading!
3 stars!
*Technically finished up to page 202*
Again, another book I read for college for my Faith and Science class. While I didn't get around to finishing it, I got most of the way through it.
It was far from the best book. In fact, I actually found it rather boring; it really just wasn't for me, which is unfortunate as I was looking forward to it. :(
I ended up giving it 3 stars instead of anything lower since it really wasn't bad, but the writing style just wasn't a match for me. Nonetheless, for a text for a class about the connections between religions and science (the two cultures as C. P. Snow would call it), it was a great match for the class. Ultimately, I guess I gave it 3 stars because I didn't have it in me to give it anything less. :\
3 stars!
~~~~~
Want more bookish stuff?
・ Comment below to discuss this book more. I'd love to hear what you think!
・ Send me a message to discuss anything — bookish and nonbookish!
・ Join Book Nerds Unite to chat with fellow book nerds!!
・ Like this review, and follow me for more reviews.
・ Subscribe to my blog, Adventures with Asia Minor! https://www.adventureswithasiaminor.com/
・ Follow my bookstagram, @asia.booknerd117!
Happy Reading!
November 13, 2021
Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
This book represents a set of transcripts of eight debates organised by the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth College and moderated by professor of physics and astronomy, Marcelo Gleiser. All debates were organised over the past five years, bringing together scientists and humanists to engage in highly constructive discussions in such fascinating topics as the mystery of consciousness, the nature of reality and the future of humanity in the age of AI, our own mortality and that of our own warming planet. Contributors include David Chalmers, Antonio Damasio, Sean Carroll and Paul Davies who I had previously heard speaking on podcasts or whose book I have read books . The discussions pit representatives of the sciences and humanities against each other, although when I say against each other I am doing the debates a severe injustice. The discussions are all deeply respectful and in no way become combative or argumentative.
The debates are all set up in a similar fashion where each speaker makes opening remarks on the subject following which the debaters are invited to ask each other questions to tease out their dissimilar points of view. The debaters do not necessarily disagree with each other per se, but their positions usually tend to augment each others' stance. All involved are deeply eloquent, intelligent and provide huge insight to their respective topics. I found this setup enhanced the overall conversation: humanities and science are not simply talking at each other or speaking to different audiences, but with each other allowing for a true augmentation of values to science. This kind of intellectual cooperation, in my view, will be increasingly necessary to shape our collective evolving future as our scientific understanding and possibilities with AI grow exponentially.
I finished the book with my brain fizzing with excitement. I was continuously taking notes for myself and scouring the Internet to find previous works of the different debaters to further follow up on their topics of discussion. This book is highly recommended for anybody who is looking to further their understanding on the current frontiers of our scientific knowledge and the questions which its further evolution raises for humanity and which cannot be answered by the sciences alone.
#GreatMindsDontThinkAlike #NetGalley
This book represents a set of transcripts of eight debates organised by the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth College and moderated by professor of physics and astronomy, Marcelo Gleiser. All debates were organised over the past five years, bringing together scientists and humanists to engage in highly constructive discussions in such fascinating topics as the mystery of consciousness, the nature of reality and the future of humanity in the age of AI, our own mortality and that of our own warming planet. Contributors include David Chalmers, Antonio Damasio, Sean Carroll and Paul Davies who I had previously heard speaking on podcasts or whose book I have read books . The discussions pit representatives of the sciences and humanities against each other, although when I say against each other I am doing the debates a severe injustice. The discussions are all deeply respectful and in no way become combative or argumentative.
The debates are all set up in a similar fashion where each speaker makes opening remarks on the subject following which the debaters are invited to ask each other questions to tease out their dissimilar points of view. The debaters do not necessarily disagree with each other per se, but their positions usually tend to augment each others' stance. All involved are deeply eloquent, intelligent and provide huge insight to their respective topics. I found this setup enhanced the overall conversation: humanities and science are not simply talking at each other or speaking to different audiences, but with each other allowing for a true augmentation of values to science. This kind of intellectual cooperation, in my view, will be increasingly necessary to shape our collective evolving future as our scientific understanding and possibilities with AI grow exponentially.
I finished the book with my brain fizzing with excitement. I was continuously taking notes for myself and scouring the Internet to find previous works of the different debaters to further follow up on their topics of discussion. This book is highly recommended for anybody who is looking to further their understanding on the current frontiers of our scientific knowledge and the questions which its further evolution raises for humanity and which cannot be answered by the sciences alone.
#GreatMindsDontThinkAlike #NetGalley
May 11, 2022
I like this book, but I think I like the concept far more than the execution. The discussions experts in different disciplines have with each other is incredibly eye opening and interesting, and I think it sheds a light on how different people interpret the world and concepts of reality. However the issue with this book is that it's a book.
The chapters of this book are lengthy and verbose, I think my eyes glazing over towards the end of each chapter. It's also written in a conversational style and sometimes it can be difficult to remember who is speaking. Or I'm stupid, I am willing to accept that reality as well. I think this would have worked brilliantly as a short docuseries or podcast, with each person and the hist being easier to identify and the length feeling more appropriate.
Even though the format to me makes this book unappealing, I would recommend giving it a read anyways as it really does bring up thought provoking conversations.
The chapters of this book are lengthy and verbose, I think my eyes glazing over towards the end of each chapter. It's also written in a conversational style and sometimes it can be difficult to remember who is speaking. Or I'm stupid, I am willing to accept that reality as well. I think this would have worked brilliantly as a short docuseries or podcast, with each person and the hist being easier to identify and the length feeling more appropriate.
Even though the format to me makes this book unappealing, I would recommend giving it a read anyways as it really does bring up thought provoking conversations.
February 23, 2022
Great minds proving that they don't think alike in this intersectional dive into psychology and philosophy.
I was provided this advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
I was provided this advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
November 18, 2021
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. All of the opinions given are my own and have been given nothing for my review.
December 30, 2021
This is a fascinating book of debates between leading thinkers, providing diverse views on a variety of subjects. The intersectionality of ideas leads to interesting insights. Brilliant!
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.
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