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Closer to Truth: Challenging Current Belief
Roundtable discussions among scientists and philosophers explore trends such as creativity, technology, and cosmology.
326 pages, Hardcover
First published May 17, 2000
65 people want to read
About the author
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
63 books29 followersRobert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual, international corporate strategist and investment banker. He has been called “one of the Western world’s most prolific interpreters of Beijing’s policies.” He holds a BA in Human Biology (Johns Hopkins), SM in Management (MIT), and PhD in Anatomy/Brain Research (UCLA). Dr. Kuhn has published over 30 books.
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June 24, 2024
TRANSCRIPTS OF DIALOGUES ON THE TELEVISION SHOW
Robert Lawrence Kuhn (born 1944) is the creator, writer and host of the public television series ‘Closer to Truth,’ as well as strategist and investment banker.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2000 book, “Mind & Brain, Health & Sex, Creativity & Thinking, Technology & Society, Universe & Meaning---what organizing theme might bring together such subjects? The answer: a personal take on topics that color the human condition at this particular period in our development. The contributors to this book---participants in the ‘Closer to Truth’ television series---are among the leaders in their fields; the informal, unrehearsed discussions, taken from the shows’ transcripts, give a good sense of state-of-the-art thinking at current intellectual frontiers. Each year I hope to take a fresh look at advances in three of my favorites: consciousness, cosmology, and creativity. My bet is that what I like, you like.”
David Chalmers observes, “The real question is, What is it about the brain that can explain consciousness?... Physical processes are really good for explaining physical structure and physical behavior. But once we get to consciousness, it seems that we’re dealing with a whole new class of problems… it’s now about the internal qualitative feel of inner mental processes. And here is where the standard method of physical explanations may well need to be amended… I think there are degrees of consciousness… We humans have a particularly complex consciousness, as expressed by our language and as represented by our concepts. And we are conscious of ourselves. Now take a dog. A dog may well be conscious of the world around it… But it may not be conscious of itself in the same complex, self-aware way that humans are.” (Pg. 11)
John Searle states, “Consciousness is not going to be reducible to brain states because it has a first-person ontology, by which I mean that consciousness exists only from the point of view of some agent of organism that experiences it. In this sense, states of the mind are subjective, while states of the brain are objective. So we can’t get a reduction of mind to brain in the classical philosophical sense, but we can still get a solid, satisfying scientific explanation.” (Pg. 23) Later, he says, “We know for a fact that our brains are conscious brains. We know, as far as we know anything, that a table is not conscious. But there’s just as much quantum mechanics in a table as there is in our brains. So if you’re going to look for consciousness at the level of quantum mechanics, you’d better start talking about the special features of brain anatomy---because as far as we know, the brain is the only place where consciousness actually occurs in the real world. Tables are not conscious.” (Pg. 45)
Gregory Benford observes, “Time is adjustable, as evolution has engineered it. It you’re in the middle of an auto accident, time hasn’t changed, thought your perceptions of time, during and after, will be different from normal experience. But the fundamental nature of time is something that physics has not truly figured out yet. It may not be comprehensible. It may be that time is one of the fundamentals of the universe, behind which there is no other actor.” (Pg. 47)
Barry Beyerstein says of parapsychological research, “the debate has gotten so technical that what we’re now talking about are very, very small statistical effects. And when the effects are that small, and that difficult for skeptics like myself and my students to replicate, then we have to look to the possibility that there are interesting statistical anomalies and artifacts here, not real phenomena… statistical significance can’t tell you what … something is. Is it some paranormal phenomenon? Or is it sensory leakage? It is fraud? Is it reporting error? Or it is some kind of subtle artifact of the experiment… [that] is normal, in the sense that it doesn’t violate our sense of the physical world. There are just so many possibilities other than paranormal explanations…” (Pg. 71)
Marvin Minsky acknowledges, “[Artificial Intelligence] really hasn’t happened yet, because computers now can’t do ordinary commonsense thinking. They don’t know enough, but there’s going to be a sudden critical point when they will. It could happen in ten years, or fifty, but since hardly anyone is working on giving computers common sense, we can’t predict when it will happen. But then everything will change, because no one will have to work.” (Pg. 272)
Gregory Stock says of communication with extraterrestrials, “The real question is, Why haven’t we had it to date? If life is as present in the universe as many imagine it is… consider this. Our galaxy is only a hundred thousand light-years across, so if an intelligent species were to take even a thousand years to move out just one light-year [and colonize], they would [geometrically expand and] fill the whole galaxy within a hundred million years, which on a universal time scale is a very short period. So why no contact?” (Pg. 304)
Francisco Ayala asserts, “I don’t expect to find human beings, or any intelligent life, over the fence---anywhere else in the universe. That won’t he repeated… I want to understand what’s happening here; I get all my universes, so to speak---as many as I want for now---here on this planet.” (Pg. 316)
Steven Koonin says of the ‘grand questions’ about our own planet, “What is the extent of the natural variability of these systems? What causes that variability? What makes ice ages is one specific question we don’t understand yet. Similarly, we don’t understand what’s going on in the deep oceans, which are an important component of the earth’s atmospheric system. All this affects the long-term climate of the earth, which is obviously of great interest to us.” (Pg. 318)
Neil de Grasse Tyson notes, “There are certain things about the world around us that DON’T make sense but are nevertheless true. Take quantum mechanics, for example, which describes nature as behaving in ways that are counterintuitive---that have no counterpart in our normal, macroscopic lives. You can never understand quantum mechanics, in some sense. All you can ever do is grow accustomed to it and accept it for what it is, knowing that it works. Who can really understand how something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time? There are many things that you just accept without actually understanding them.” (Pg. 333)
Andrei Linde states, “Einstein’s relativity applies to light. It does not apply to the speed of expansion of the whole thing—all space-time. By way of analogy, suppose you send a signal along a membrane, and the signal moves at a constant speed. Next, paint two dots on the membrane. There is no upper bound on the increase of distance between those two dots if the distance between them is large, even though the signal still travels at the same speed along the membrane. Likewise, there’s no upper bound on the speed of inflationary expansion in the early universe, even though light still travels at the same speed. Inflation theory tells how fast the whole of space expanded.” (Pg. 361)
Frank Tipler suggests, “Obviously, I’m going to think that we’ll have moved toward acceptance of the Omega Point theory. The reason is that Andrei [Linde] and his colleagues are inventing new forces in physics to accomplish his inflation mechanism, whereas tried-and-tested physics… leads inexorably to the Omega Point theory. The known laws of physics are sufficient to tell us what the future of the universe will be. If the universe were to expand forever, then black hole evaporation would give rise to a violation of a very fundamental law of quantum mechanics. I’m sure that can’t happen. That’s why I’m confident that the universe will expand to a maximum size and then contract to a final singularity.” (Pg. 381)
This book, and Kuhn’s TV series, will be of great interest to those interested in the kinds of speculative issues that Kuhn selects.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn (born 1944) is the creator, writer and host of the public television series ‘Closer to Truth,’ as well as strategist and investment banker.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2000 book, “Mind & Brain, Health & Sex, Creativity & Thinking, Technology & Society, Universe & Meaning---what organizing theme might bring together such subjects? The answer: a personal take on topics that color the human condition at this particular period in our development. The contributors to this book---participants in the ‘Closer to Truth’ television series---are among the leaders in their fields; the informal, unrehearsed discussions, taken from the shows’ transcripts, give a good sense of state-of-the-art thinking at current intellectual frontiers. Each year I hope to take a fresh look at advances in three of my favorites: consciousness, cosmology, and creativity. My bet is that what I like, you like.”
David Chalmers observes, “The real question is, What is it about the brain that can explain consciousness?... Physical processes are really good for explaining physical structure and physical behavior. But once we get to consciousness, it seems that we’re dealing with a whole new class of problems… it’s now about the internal qualitative feel of inner mental processes. And here is where the standard method of physical explanations may well need to be amended… I think there are degrees of consciousness… We humans have a particularly complex consciousness, as expressed by our language and as represented by our concepts. And we are conscious of ourselves. Now take a dog. A dog may well be conscious of the world around it… But it may not be conscious of itself in the same complex, self-aware way that humans are.” (Pg. 11)
John Searle states, “Consciousness is not going to be reducible to brain states because it has a first-person ontology, by which I mean that consciousness exists only from the point of view of some agent of organism that experiences it. In this sense, states of the mind are subjective, while states of the brain are objective. So we can’t get a reduction of mind to brain in the classical philosophical sense, but we can still get a solid, satisfying scientific explanation.” (Pg. 23) Later, he says, “We know for a fact that our brains are conscious brains. We know, as far as we know anything, that a table is not conscious. But there’s just as much quantum mechanics in a table as there is in our brains. So if you’re going to look for consciousness at the level of quantum mechanics, you’d better start talking about the special features of brain anatomy---because as far as we know, the brain is the only place where consciousness actually occurs in the real world. Tables are not conscious.” (Pg. 45)
Gregory Benford observes, “Time is adjustable, as evolution has engineered it. It you’re in the middle of an auto accident, time hasn’t changed, thought your perceptions of time, during and after, will be different from normal experience. But the fundamental nature of time is something that physics has not truly figured out yet. It may not be comprehensible. It may be that time is one of the fundamentals of the universe, behind which there is no other actor.” (Pg. 47)
Barry Beyerstein says of parapsychological research, “the debate has gotten so technical that what we’re now talking about are very, very small statistical effects. And when the effects are that small, and that difficult for skeptics like myself and my students to replicate, then we have to look to the possibility that there are interesting statistical anomalies and artifacts here, not real phenomena… statistical significance can’t tell you what … something is. Is it some paranormal phenomenon? Or is it sensory leakage? It is fraud? Is it reporting error? Or it is some kind of subtle artifact of the experiment… [that] is normal, in the sense that it doesn’t violate our sense of the physical world. There are just so many possibilities other than paranormal explanations…” (Pg. 71)
Marvin Minsky acknowledges, “[Artificial Intelligence] really hasn’t happened yet, because computers now can’t do ordinary commonsense thinking. They don’t know enough, but there’s going to be a sudden critical point when they will. It could happen in ten years, or fifty, but since hardly anyone is working on giving computers common sense, we can’t predict when it will happen. But then everything will change, because no one will have to work.” (Pg. 272)
Gregory Stock says of communication with extraterrestrials, “The real question is, Why haven’t we had it to date? If life is as present in the universe as many imagine it is… consider this. Our galaxy is only a hundred thousand light-years across, so if an intelligent species were to take even a thousand years to move out just one light-year [and colonize], they would [geometrically expand and] fill the whole galaxy within a hundred million years, which on a universal time scale is a very short period. So why no contact?” (Pg. 304)
Francisco Ayala asserts, “I don’t expect to find human beings, or any intelligent life, over the fence---anywhere else in the universe. That won’t he repeated… I want to understand what’s happening here; I get all my universes, so to speak---as many as I want for now---here on this planet.” (Pg. 316)
Steven Koonin says of the ‘grand questions’ about our own planet, “What is the extent of the natural variability of these systems? What causes that variability? What makes ice ages is one specific question we don’t understand yet. Similarly, we don’t understand what’s going on in the deep oceans, which are an important component of the earth’s atmospheric system. All this affects the long-term climate of the earth, which is obviously of great interest to us.” (Pg. 318)
Neil de Grasse Tyson notes, “There are certain things about the world around us that DON’T make sense but are nevertheless true. Take quantum mechanics, for example, which describes nature as behaving in ways that are counterintuitive---that have no counterpart in our normal, macroscopic lives. You can never understand quantum mechanics, in some sense. All you can ever do is grow accustomed to it and accept it for what it is, knowing that it works. Who can really understand how something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time? There are many things that you just accept without actually understanding them.” (Pg. 333)
Andrei Linde states, “Einstein’s relativity applies to light. It does not apply to the speed of expansion of the whole thing—all space-time. By way of analogy, suppose you send a signal along a membrane, and the signal moves at a constant speed. Next, paint two dots on the membrane. There is no upper bound on the increase of distance between those two dots if the distance between them is large, even though the signal still travels at the same speed along the membrane. Likewise, there’s no upper bound on the speed of inflationary expansion in the early universe, even though light still travels at the same speed. Inflation theory tells how fast the whole of space expanded.” (Pg. 361)
Frank Tipler suggests, “Obviously, I’m going to think that we’ll have moved toward acceptance of the Omega Point theory. The reason is that Andrei [Linde] and his colleagues are inventing new forces in physics to accomplish his inflation mechanism, whereas tried-and-tested physics… leads inexorably to the Omega Point theory. The known laws of physics are sufficient to tell us what the future of the universe will be. If the universe were to expand forever, then black hole evaporation would give rise to a violation of a very fundamental law of quantum mechanics. I’m sure that can’t happen. That’s why I’m confident that the universe will expand to a maximum size and then contract to a final singularity.” (Pg. 381)
This book, and Kuhn’s TV series, will be of great interest to those interested in the kinds of speculative issues that Kuhn selects.
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