I’ve just finished reading the latest collection of Edge essays: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Here’s my Amazon review:
Of course it’s mixed… isn’t that the point?
Most non-fiction books are written to advance a thesis; to present a conclusion, a theory which explains the facts. When you realize that you’ve got something wrong, that you have to change your mind, it’s natural to be somewhat restrained about the fact. After all, we live in a society that demands certainty – however absurd that expectation may be – and castigates people as “flip-floppers”. I think that we could all benefit from reading about how thoughtful men and women were humble and open enough to admit that they were wrong.
Oh sure, this is a mixed bag. There are a few essays where you get to the end and scratch your head, wondering whatever happened to the purported change. But most are excellent. There are some obvious common themes: cosmology, evolution, climate change, science and religion, gender, consciousness. It seems intuitively obvious that these big questions which have both a scientific and a societal dimension will be associated with skepticism and revision.
Any reader of a book like this is going to be faced with the personal question: what have I changed my mind about? Well, 10 years ago I was in the computational neuroscience camp: I thought that the Churchlands had got most of it right. Somewhere along the way, I realized that biology, from the simplest plants to the most cerebral animals, was actually based on information systems. I’m not talking about computers as metaphors for brains, or anything like that; I mean that at some, very early point, the self-replicating information patterns co-opted and started to organize the material substrates of life.
And just for the record, this blog entry was composed in a copy of Firefox running on OpenSolaris 2008.11, hosted on my Mac Mini using VirtualBox.
