I just got back from the Freeman Dyson talk at the Town Hall. I’ve always liked his writing – I thought Infinite In All Directions was wonderful – but I’ve been concerned with his wobbly thinking after the Templeton Prize. See Edge #180 for Dawkins’ scathing comments about Dyson’s Templeton piece. Like Dawkins, I don’t know what to make of stuff like:
I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.
Since I’m one of those people who think that “minds are what brains do”, this is completely incoherent.
Anyway, the talk began with a very entertaining introduction by George Dyson, Freeman’s son, which included the clip from ST:NG where Picard speculates that an object that the Enterprise has discovered might be “a Dyson sphere”! As Freeman Dyson later commented, everybody completely misunderstood him: he always meant “biosphere”, specifically a loose assemblage of inhabited objects orbiting at the right distance from a star. A rigid sphere would be mechanically impossible.
Freeman Dyson’s talk was actually on biotechnology. It’s taken people less than 50 years to go from the first computers to a total addition to pervasive computer technology. He expects the same thing to happen to biotech over the next 50 years – complete domestication. He got a bit mystical over evolution – in the beginning everything shared genetic information horizontally – “open source biology”; then some organisms got selfish and Darwinian evolution kicked in; now humans are ushering in a new era of genetic sharing, marking the end of the “Darwinian interlude”. A rather blinkered view, IMHO. There was stuff about creating plants with silicon leaves to boost energy capture from 1% to 10%, and an impassioned plea for scientific freedom from political interference. And er… that’s it.
The questions were mostly softballs about energy futures, and the wonder of mathematics, and so forth. And then someone asked him about science and religion, and Dyson got all hot and bothered and ranted about Dawkins for a bit, and then realized that he was getting over the top, and backed off. And then I left. I hope many of the audience (200+) bought his new book; since I’ve already read most of the essays (reviews from the NYT, NYRB, etc.), I didn’t bother.
PS It was odd to be back at the Town Hall for the third night in a row – two Tallis Scholars concerts, now this lecture.