Jim Holt

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“You Will Live Forever, Or At Least Until The Universe Falls Apart”

July 27, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jeez, Jim Holt is a dream to read. If you’ve never picked up his 2012 philosophical and moving inquiry, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, it’s well worth your time. For awhile it was cheekily listed No. 1 at the Strand in the “Best Books to Read While Drunk” category, but I don’t drink, and I adored it.

In a 2003 Slate article, “My Son, the Robot,” Holt wrote of Bill McKibben’s Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, a cautionary nonfiction tale that warned our siblings soon would be silicon sisters, thanks to the progress of genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology. It was only a matter of time.

Holt was unmoved by the clarion call, believing human existence unlikely to be at an inflection point and thinking the author too dour about tomorrow. While Holt’s certainly right that we’re not going to defeat death anytime soon despite what excitable Transhumanists promise, both McKibben and the techno-optimists probably have time on their side.

An excerpt:

Take McKibben’s chief bogy, genetic engineering—specifically, germline engineering, in which an embryo’s DNA would be manipulated in the hopes of producing a “designer baby” with, say, a higher IQ, a knack for music, and no predisposition to obesity. The best reason to ban it (as the European Community has already done) is the physical risk it poses to individuals—namely, to the children whose genes are altered, with unforeseen and possibly horrendous consequences. The next best reason is the risk it poses to society—exacerbating inequality by creating a “GenRich” class of individuals who are smarter, healthier, and handsomer than the underclass of “Naturals.” McKibben cites these reasons, as did Fukuyama (and many others) before him. However, what really animates both authors is a more philosophical point: that genetic engineering would alter “human nature” (Fukuyama) or take away the “meaning” of life (McKibben). As far as I can tell, the argument from human nature and the argument from meaning are mere terminological variants of each other. And both are woolly, especially when contrasted with the libertarian argument that people should be free to do what they wish as long as other parties aren’t harmed.

Finally, McKibben’s reasoning fitfully betrays a vulgar variety of genetic determinism. He approvingly quotes phrases like “genetically engineered thoughts.” Altering an embryo’s DNA to make your child, say, less prone to violence would turn him into an “automaton.” Giving him “genes expressing proteins to boost his memory, to shape his stature” would leave him with “no more choice about how to live his life than a Hindu born untouchable.” Why isn’t the same true with the randomly assigned genes we now have?

Now to the deeper fallacy. McKibben takes it for granted that we are at an inflection point of history, suspended between the prehistoric and the Promethean. He writes, “we just happen to be alive at the brief and interesting moment when [technological] growth starts to really matter—when it spikes.” Everything is about to change.

The extropian visionaries arrayed against him—people like Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and Lee Silver—agree. In fact, they think we are on the verge of conquering death (which McKibben thinks would be a terrible thing). And they mean RIGHT NOW. When you die, you should have your brain frozen; then, in a couple of decades, it will get thawed out and nanobots will repair the damage; then you can start augmenting it with silicon chips; finally, your entire mental software, and your consciousness along with it (you hope), will get uploaded into a computer; and—with multiple copies as insurance—you will live forever, or at least until the universe falls apart.•

 

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“People Did Not Know The Question Existed”

May 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Andrei Linde, Stanford physicist by way of Russia, and his “chaotic expansion” theory of the universe, are featured in an early chapter of Jim Holt’s terrific 2012 book, Why Does the World Exist? In this clip, Linde relays how his central idea for explaining how it all came to be was rebuffed–somewhat–by Stephen Hawking in an unusual circumstance.

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“Only In The Last Few Decades Has A Mathematics Of Roughness Emerged”

May 9, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of a really good Jim Holt New York Review of Books piece about the posthumously published memoir by Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the fractal, who saw the mathematics of roughness not only in clouds and cauliflower but in financial markets as well:

“Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.

To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)

Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it. He had a peripatetic career, but he spent much of it as a researcher for IBM in upstate New York. In the late 1970s he became famous for popularizing the idea of self-similarity, and for coining the word ‘fractal’ (from the Latin fractus, meaning broken) to designate self-similar forms. In 1980 he discovered the ‘Mandelbrot set,’ whose shape—it looks a bit like a warty snowman or beetle—came to represent the newly fashionable science of chaos. What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed, and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable.”

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“Stephen Hawking Declared That Philosophy Was ‘Dead'”

June 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Every time I think that physics is tremendously important and philosophy is not, I remind myself that physicists didn’t come up with democracy. From a recent Jim Holt piece in the New York Times:

“Last year at a Google ‘Zeitgeist conference’ in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was ‘dead.’ Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy ‘murky and inconsequential’ and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that ‘philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.’

Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. ‘Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,’ Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science.”

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“He Had Taken A Few Bites Out Of An Apple That Was, Apparently, Laced With Cyanide”

June 23, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

This month marks the 99th birthday of British mathematician Alan Turing, the father of computing. The opening of Jim Holt’s 2006 New Yorker review of David Leavitt’s book about Turing:

“On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced with cyanide. At an inquest, a few days later, his death was ruled a suicide. Turing was, by necessity rather than by inclination, a man of secrets. One of his secrets had been exposed two years before his death, when he was convicted of “gross indecency” for having a homosexual affair. Another, however, had not yet come to light. It was Turing who was chiefly responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War, an achievement that helped save Britain from defeat in the dark days of 1941. Had this been publicly known, he would have been acclaimed a national hero. But the existence of the British code-breaking effort remained closely guarded even after the end of the war; the relevant documents weren’t declassified until the nineteen-seventies. And it wasn’t until the eighties that Turing got the credit he deserved for a second, and equally formidable, achievement: creating the blueprint for the modern computer.”

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Alan Turing the Cat who, by the way, pretty much sucks at math:

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