For about a year now, I have been working on a book in which I hope to address some of the most fundamental questions that have long faced mankind and presumably will continue to do so for quite some time to come. Doing so, I was fortunate to stumble across a book by the title of The Last Unknowns. Edited by John Brockman, of Edge Organization, and published in June 2019, it contains a list of about a hundred questions of exactly this kind. Prominent among the authors is a Nobel Prize winner, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who wrote the introduction. The rest form an impressive list made up of professors—mainly of physics, computer science, brain science, biology, evolution, and ethics, and education—the heads of various research institutes, and journalists. All with the occasional entrepreneur, artist and musician thrown in.
I read the book for A to Z. Twice. As I did so, it occurred to me that I might list what I considered the most interesting questions and, based on my studies so far, try to provide brief answers for them. Doing so, I can only hope my readers will enjoy the intellectual exercise as much as I did.
So here goes.
Q. Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable?
M.A (My answer). Perhaps. If so, we might as well give up any hope of ever gaining a complete understanding of such systems, with all the consequences that such a lack of understanding implies.
Q. How would changes in the marginal tax rate affect our efforts and motivation?
M.A. Raising taxes to confiscatory levels, as in some Western countries during the late 1960s and 1970s, is certain to reduce effort and motivation. And vice versa: in trying to stimulate an economy, few things are as useful as a cut on taxes. Ask Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Q. Will it ever be possible for us to transcend our limited experience of time as linear?
M.A. In the past, there have been many societies that did not experience time as linear. The way they saw it, it was either static or cyclic. So why not in the future, too?
Q. How can science best leverage reason to overcome the heroic passion for war?
M.A. First, who says war is exclusively the product of unreason? And second, suppose we do in fact succeed in getting rid of the passion in question; won’t doing so also put an end to some of our noblest qualities, such as curiosity, comradeship, courage, entrepreneurship, and self-sacrifice?
Q. Will the appearance of a new species of talented computational intelligence result in improving the moral behavior of persons and societies?
M.A. No. If there is one field in which computers and everything they stand for are irrelevant, it is morality.
Q. What is the hard limit on human longevity?
M.A. The book of Genesis, which was probably put together about 800 BCE, puts it at 120 years. Limiting ourselves to cases where the documentation may be relied on, during the three millennia since the just one person is known to have live longer: to wit, a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years, 164 days. And even in her case it has been suggested that the relevant documentation was counterfeit.
Q. Why are we so often kind to strangers when nobody is watching and we have nothing to gain?
M.A. It depends on what you mean by “so often.” As long as this is not spelt out, the question remains meaningless.
Q. Is there a way for humans to directly experience what it’s like to be another entity?
M.A. No.
Q. Will a machine ever be able to feel what an organism feels?
M.A. Probably not. Computers may be sufficiently intelligent to beat the world’s master at chess; but there is no indication that they are, or ever will be, able to experience such things as love, rage, etc.
Q. Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end “the battle of the sexes”?
M.A. I hope not. In the words of a 1950s popular Israeli song, take the “battle” away, and all that remains will be the plumbing.
Q. How do I describe the achievements, meanings and power of Beethoven’s piano sonata Appassionata?
M.A. Don’t even try. Instead, listen to it many, many times. Better still, play and replay it as well as you can.
Q. Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without a purpose?
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M.A. No one knows or is likely to know. But the fact that we do experience such feelings is perhaps the strongest argument against the idea that the biological depends entirely on the physical.
Q. How will we know if we achieve universal happiness?
M.A. I once stayed in southern California where the sky is always blue and the temperature always around 25 degrees. Having asked what living in such a climate was like, I was told that, after a couple of weeks, one no longer notices. Similarly, chances are that, once we achieve universal happiness, we’ll get used to it, take it for granted, and start feeling unhappy once again.
Q. Have we left the age of reason, never to return?
M.A. Has there even been an age of reason?
Q. Will humans ever embrace their own diversity?
M.A. They’d better, because they have always been and will always remain diverse. Furthermore, where there is no diversity among people they will go right ahead and invent it.
Q. Are stories bad for us?
M.A. How can they be, given that it is they who give us our identity?
Q. What will be the use of 99 percent of humanity for the 1 percent?
M.A. Similar to the use 100,000 men who built the great pyramid had for the Pharaoh who put them to work. Does that mean they lived in vain?
Q. Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?
M.A. Some would argue that our capacity for love is.
Q. Are the laws of physics unique and inevitable?
M.A. Scientists like to think so. However, they cannot prove it.
Q. How can AI and other digital technologies help us create global institutions that we can trust?
M.A. The one thing that can generate trust is trust. That is why technology can only help us in a very marginal way, if at all.
Q. Is a single world language and culture inevitable?
M.A. Not only isn’t it inevitable, but it will never come to pass. The reason? Where there are no differences, people will go right ahead and invent them. And doing so won’t take them very long, either.
Q. What quirk of evolution caused us to develop the ability to do pure mathematics?
M.A. This question might seem quirky at first sight. However, it has the power to blow away our entire Darwin-based view of the world. Evolution theory teaches that only “useful” qualities survive by being passed to the next generation. So how did our ability to do pure math, which is of no use whatsoever, survive?
Q. What does it mean to be human?
M.A. To be capable of anything.
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To which I’d like to add one question of my own:
If the brain is a computer and thought equals computation, why do so many people find math the most difficult of all subjects?