John Brockman

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“It Produces Machines Which Can Run, And Walk, And Fly, And Dig, And Swing Through The Trees, And Think”

May 1, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even someone as lacking in religion as myself can be perplexed by Richard Dawkins’ midlife anti-theology mission to irk people of faith on chat shows and the like. In his proselytizing–and that’s what it is–he has the fervor of a particularly devout and curmudgeonly priest. It’s true that many a horrid act has been committed in the name of the father, but so have many others been by those who believe (like Dawkins and I do) that we’re orphans. I don’t want to deny someone on an operating table (or the one doing the operating) from believing in a little in magic at that delicate moment, even if it is rot. Trust in science, and say a prayer if you like. 

But I wouldn’t let his noisily running a chariot over the gods make me deny his wonderful intellect and contributions to knowledge, from genes to memes. At Edge, the site’s founder and longtime NYC avant-gardist, John Brockman, has an engrossing talk with the evolutionary biologist about his “vision of life.” The transcript makes for wonderful reading.

Dawkins believes if life exists elsewhere in the universe (and his educated guess is that it does), it’s of the Darwinian, evolutionary kind, that no other biological system besides the one we know would work under the laws of physics. He also notes that we contribute in our own way to the amazing progress of life, even if our time on the playing field can be brutal and brief. As Dawkins puts it, “we are temporary survival machines” coded to be hellbent on seeing our genes persevere, even though life will eventually evolve in ways presently unimaginable to us. It will still be life, and that’s our gift to it. No matter what we personally feel is the main purpose of our existence, it’s actually that.

The opening:

Natural selection is about the differential survival of coded information which has power to influence its probability of being replicated, which pretty much means genes. Coded information, which has the power to make copies of itself—“replicator”—whenever that comes into existence in the universe, it potentially could be the basis for some kind of Darwinian selection. And when that happens, you then have the opportunity for this extraordinary phenomenon which we call “life.”

My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there’s only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call “life” to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that’s it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life. 

If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication. The key to the process is that … let’s call them “genes” because nowadays they pretty much all are genes. Genes have different probabilities of surviving. The ones that survive, because they have such high fidelity replication, are the ones which we see in the world, the ones which dominate gene pools in the world. So for me, the replicator, the gene, DNA, is absolutely key to the whole process of Darwinian natural selection. So when you ask the question, what about group selection, what about higher levels of selection, what about different levels of selection, everything comes down to gene selection. Gene selection is fundamentally what is really going on. 

Originally these replicating entities would have been floating free and just replicating in the primeval soup, whatever that was. But they “discovered” a technique of ganging together into huge robot vehicles, which we call individual organisms.•

 

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“You Can’t Escape From An Intermedia Kinetic Environment”

November 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before Edge editor John Brockman left behind the imprecision of the arts for the cool head of science, he was an erstwhile 1960s Bloomingdale’s trainee who had stepped into the hothouse of NYC culture, electioneering in favor of “Intermedia Kinetic Environments.” Even then, Brockman didn’t think the play was the thing. The opening of “So What Happens After Happenings?” Elenore Lester’s 1966 New York Times article about him:

“‘Hate happenings. Love Intermedia Kinetic Environments.’ John Brockman speaking — partly kidding, but conveying the notion that Happenings are Out and Intermedia Kinetic Environments are In in the places where the action is. John Brockman, the New York Film Festival’s 25-year-old coordinator of a special events program on independent cinema in the United States, plugging into the switched-on ‘expanded cinema’ world in which a film is not just a movie, but an Experience, an Event, an Environment. This is a humming electronic world, in which multiple films, tapes, amplifiers, kinetic sculpture, lights and live dancers or actors are combined to Involve Audiences in a Total Theater Experience. Unlike Happenings, which often involve audiences in complicated relationships with plastics, bottles, sacks, ropes and other objects, Intermedia Kinetic Experiences permit audiences simply to sit, stand, walk or lie down and allow their senses to be Saturated by Media.

No Way Out

‘You can’t escape from an Intermedia Kinetic Environment the way you can from a play or any art form that reaches you through language,’ says Brockman. ‘This is primary experience. It takes place in a 360-degree environment.’ Brockman, who fully accepts Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the-medium-is-the-message’ thesis, believes that full exposure to I.K.E. is positively ‘therapeutic.'”

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“Man Was Nothing More Than A Model, A Technique. It Is Necessary To Construct A New Model.”

November 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

John Brockman, the singular force behind the online journal of scientific avant-garde, Edge, which has offered up morsels of genius like this one, has republished a Spiegel profile of himself. An excerpt:

“He is charming, without hiding his own interests. He is proud of his life, his intelligence, without that he would have to apologize for it. He is a key figure of the late 20th and early 21st century, the éminence grise and major source of inspiration for the globally dominant culture, which he himself named as the “third culture”.

It is not Brockman, but his authors, who are well-known: Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman. Physicists, neuroscientists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, fixed stars of the science age, superstars of nonfiction bestseller lists, the reason for Brockman’s financial success and good mood.

‘These are all old friends,’ he says.

‘I’ve been their agent for decades. It’s a wonderful life: I’m doing what I love to do, I read smart books and get well-paid for it.’

The new works of his authors are next to each other in the conference room of the agency. Brockman, 73, operates out of a spacious whole floor on Fifth Avenue in New York with glass office walls and a view of the famous Flatiron Building.

These books deal with the big questions: What is man? What is the brain? What is free will? What is intelligence? And what happens when machines become smarter than humans?

Brockman likes the big issues, everything else is small talk to him.

‘Man was nothing more than a model, a technique. It is necessary to construct a new model”, he writes in his book Afterwords. ‘The human delusion lies in the belief that the human being is the basis of reality and the final goal of the evolution.’

The book first appeared in 1969 under the ingenious title By the Late John Brockman and begins with the programmatic sentence: ‘Man is dead.’

It is a small masterpiece of clear-thinking, a youthful outcry. Brockman was not even 30 at the time.

The book is aggressive, curious and prophetic and strips away the humanism of the literary mind with a Ludwig-Wittgenstein-like toughness: ‘The concept of freedom,’ he writes, ‘is simply absurd.’

The book made him briefly known, then it was forgotten. It was too early, too radical, nobody wanted to say goodbye to humans, at least not in the literary milieu.

And now with the book published in German for the first time as Afterwords, you realize that you recognize or understand some revolutions only in retrospect 30 or 40 years later.“

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“There’s No Jurassic Park Scenario Going To Play Out”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a new Edge discussion about de-extinction, John Brockman asks Stewart Brand about the dangers inherent in the reintroduction of bygone birds and bears into the world, which, you would think, would have some unintended consequences. An excerpt:

“John Brockman:

What are the dangers, if any?

Stewart Brand:

The dangers of de-extinction mostly get interpreted in ecological or conservation terms, and mostly by people who are mistakenly worried that nature is really, really fragile. We saw this when a year ago we had a TEDx de-extinction that Ryan organized that had twenty-five scientists holding forth on various aspects of a wide number of projects that are going on—everything from the European aurochs to the Spanish bucardo to the gastric brooding frog in Australia.

Our projects are not the only one. Then the news went out: “De-extinction might happen”, and it was great because it went out in a way that people understood it as a scientific issue. They understood we weren’t going to have dinosaurs. There’s no Jurassic park scenario going to play out. But immediately you would see in these wonderful comment lines after every place online, where the trolls emerge and start fretting, and the hand-wringing would be around, let’s see: what if you bring it back and it turns out to be insanely invasive? And, passenger pigeons, there used to be five billion and suddenly there’s five billion birds crapping on everything, it’ll be like kudzu. Well, actually it’s not an invasive. They were in North America for 22 million years. The invasive in this story is us, and we’re the ones who shot them all to death. If we’ve got an invasive to worry about it’s the human one, which is fair. Nature will accommodate these birds coming back. Nature’s not broken.

Another common comment is that there’s obviously no habitat left for these birds, or for the woolly mammoths, because the world has changed since their day. Again, time machine notions of if you were suddenly thrown into the 15th century or the 24th century, you wouldn’t be able to function because you wouldn’t know how to call a cab. It’s not like that in nature, and things blend in and take time in. Nature is not broken just because humans have been farming for 10,000 years. It is very robust.

What are the real dangers? The real dangers are it won’t work.”

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“I Believe That There’s No End To How Much We Can Track Each Other”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kevin Kelly, one of the tech thinkers I admire most, was recently profiled by the New York Times’ wonderfully dyspeptic David Carr, and now he’s participated in an excellent Q&A at John Brockman’s Edge.org. 

I think if you read this blog with any regularity, you know I believe that legislation won’t control or alter surveillance and snooping, won’t stem the flow of information any more than Prohibition stopped the flow of alcohol. Everybody is drinking; everybody’s drunk. That topic is addressed in the first question of the interview:

“Edge:

How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?

Kevin Kelly:

The question that I’m asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can’t stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?”•

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“Thirty Years Ago, Robert Trivers Disappeared”

March 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of John Brockman’s Edge essay about influential if eccentric evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, which reads like a hallucination:

“Thirty years ago, Robert Trivers disappeared.

My connection to him is goes back to the 1970s. He had left Harvard and was roaming around Santa Cruz when I was introduced to him in a telephone call by our mutual friend Huey P. Newton, Chairman of The Black Panther Party. Huey put Robert on the phone and we had a conversation in which he introduced me to his ideas. I recall noting at the time the power and energy of his intellect. Huey, excited by Robert’s ideas on deceit and self-deception, was eager for the three of us to get together.

We never had the meeting. Huey met a very bad end. I lost track of Robert. Over the years there were rumors about a series of breakdowns; he was in Jamaica; in jail.

He fell off the map.

But during his thirty year disappearance, the influence of his ideas has grown and transcended the purely scientific arena. And through all his ups and downs, he never stopped working on his theories.”

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“He Planned To Gather The 100 Most Brilliant Minds In The World In A Room”

January 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

James Lee Byars, “The perfect Love Letter is I write ‘I love you’ backwards in the air," 1974.

From “The Man Who Runs the World’s Smartest Website,” an Observer piece about literary agent John Brockman and his heady site, Edge, which grew from an idea by the late artist James Lee Byars:

“In cyberspace, Brockman is best known for Edge.org, a site he founded as a continuation of what he describes as ‘a failed art experiment’ by his late friend, performance artist James Lee Byars. Byars believed, Brockman recalls, ‘that to arrive at a satisfactory plateau of knowledge it was pure folly to go to Widener Library at Harvard and read six million books. Instead, he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in and have them ask one another the questions they’d been asking themselves. The expected result – in theory – was to be a synthesis of all thought.’ But it didn’t work out that way. Byars did identify his 100 most brilliant minds and phoned each of them. The result: 70 hung up on him.

Byars died in 1997, but Brockman persisted with his idea, or at any rate with the notion that it might be possible to do something analogous using the internet. And so Edge.org was born as a kind of high-octane online salon with Brockman as its editor and host. He describes it as ‘a conversation. We look for people whose creative work has expanded our notion of who and what we are. We encourage work on the cutting edge of the culture and the investigation of ideas that have not been generally exposed.’”

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