BioMed Central Blog
"What have you changed your mind about?"
One of the great things about the internet in general, and open access research in particular, is how accessible the frontiers of human knowledge have become. The website edge.org demonstrates this with a thought-provoking set of 165 short essays from leading neuroscientists, physicists, technologists, philosophers and other thinkers, in response to the following question:
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?
A small selection of highlights:
- Roger Shank, one of the founding fathers of AI, notes his fading hopes for superhuman AI in his own lifetime: "I am a lot older and we are barely closer to creating smart machines."
- Bart Kosko, fuzzy logic pioneer, says why he now thinks the sample mean isn't all its cracked up to be (he'd take the median).
- Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux discusses the surprising evidence that memories are altered by the act of remembering them, so that in fact, "your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it".
- Terry Sejnowski questions the conventional reliance on the average firing rates of neurons as the primary statistical variable, noting that increasing evidence suggests that the exact timing may after all encode important information.
- Stanislas Dehean speculates as to whether we may be getting close metaphorically speaking, to finding a Schrödinger equation for the brain.
- Physicist Lee Smolin relates his changing views on the concept of time.
It is stimulating stuff, and thanks to the combination of Wikipedia and open access research literature, these essays provide 165 accessible starting points that can be used by anyone who is curious to explore some of farthest reaches of our knowledge (and ignorance) about the world around us.
Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 18:33 Comments (0)