What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this wide-ranging assortment of 150 brief essays, well-known figures from every conceivable field demonstrate why it's a prerogative of all thoughtful people to change their mind once in a while. Technologist Ray Kurzweil says he now shares Enrico Fermi's question: if other intelligent civilizations exist, then where are they? Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) reveals that he has lost faith in probability as a guiding light for making decisions. Oliver Morton (Mapping Mars) confesses that he has lost his childlike faith in the value of manned space flight to distant worlds. J. Craig Venter, celebrated for his work on the human genome, has ceased to believe that nature can absorb any abuses that we subject it to, and that world governments must move quickly to prevent global disaster. Alan Alda says, So far, I've changed my mind twice about God, going from believer to atheist to agnostic. Brockman, editor of Edge.org and numerous anthologies, has pulled together a thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions. (Jan.)
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Product Description

Even geniuses change their minds sometimes.

Edge (www.edge.org), the influential online intellectual salon, recently asked 150 high-powered thinkers to discuss their most telling missteps and reconsiderations: What have you changed your mind about? The answers were brilliant, eye-opening, fascinating, sometimes shocking, and certain to kick-start countless passionate debates.

Read Steven Pinker on the future of human evolution • Richard Dawkins on the mysteries of courtship • Sam Harris on the indifference of Mother Nature • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the irrelevance of probability • Chris Anderson on the reality of global warming • Alan Alda on the existence of God • Lisa Randall on the secrets of the Sun • Ray Kurzweil on the possibility of extraterrestrial life • Brian Eno on what it means to be a "revolutionary" • Helen Fisher on love, fidelity, and the viability of marriage • Irene Pepperberg on learning from parrots. . . and many others.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; First Edition edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061686549
• ISBN-13: 978-0061686542
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #107,231 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag of short essays, January 11, 2009

By	Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The Edge Foundation is an organization of science and technology intellectuals created "to seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have themselves ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Its main activity is maintaining its free website and circulating free regular emails about the contributions of its stable of intellectuals.

Once a year Edge publishes a collection of essays devoted to a single question; the 2008 question was devoted to issues the contributors have changed their minds about. Amazon has provided an excellent table of contents which describes in some detail the answers of all of the contributors. It is almost impossible to provide a meaningful review of so many essays, but it is great fun to read through the contents, and then search out more information from authors of interest, either in the book itself or in other resources. (Google does a great job of searching out more information by entering the author's name and a few of the words from the Table of Contents.)

The model of scientific inquiry seems to embrace the idea that scientists should often change their minds, as new evidence is presented. And yet, the history of science is filled with contra examples, and it is striking that most of the examples in this book are changes of opinion or emphasis, not fundamental changes in approach.

Sharon Begley in "Newsweek" identifies only a couple, including this from Stephen Pinker:

"Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field 'may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over' 50,000 years ago, Pinker says."

Nevertheless, the essays are fascinating whatever their conclusions, showing how the scientific minds work on a pre-set problem. Next year's Question may produce more specific answers: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

As John Brockman points out:

"Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news."

Whatever your own views, these essays give the reader plenty to think about and for this reader an enormous amount of pleasure.

Robert C. Ross 2009

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Speculations on our human or transhuman future , January 15, 2009

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This is one of the finest of the `Edge Symposiums.' It is rich in ideas, speculations about what the future is going to be. Not all of these speculations are rosy, and a number of writers put forth doomsday ideas. The possibility of accidental nuclear war, the idea that we have already reached in many areas the best we are going to do and can expect from now on only Decline, the possibility that disaster may come through radical climate change, or though supernova explosion or asteroid collision are mentioned. But from my point of view the dark possibilities also grow out of some of the most optimistic prognoses. There are many essays here on various ways `humanity' is going to be transformed or transcended, rendered obsolete or irrelevant. There is talk of the singularity the moment when machine- intelligence replaces ours as prime - maker of our world. There are various speculations on ways in which our minds may be copied and then downloaded into machines which will then go on self- improving themselves cognitively. There are thoughts on ways we will engage in a cosmic competition and spread through the universe our silicon- descendants or perhaps viral heirs. There are also a whole host of speculations on shadow-worlds, parallel universes, perhaps microbically small, perhaps vast in ways we cannot imagine. There are too speculations of how we disappointed in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence are going to produce alternative intelligences who will become our real friends, and ensure that we are not lonely in the universe.
What disturbs me in considering many of the essays is that they often seem to relate to humanity as if we were simply `minds' and not people who live lives, and have histories and complex relationships with other human beings. The whole presumption that some other kind of being can be manufactured by us or can somehow come out of our own researches seems to me a vast simplification as to what we in all our complexity are.
Here I should note that there are a number of writers who question the very question of the project. One says nothing can possibly change everything, and another suggests that we cannot possibly know what the change will be, as we have in the past never been able to see the surprise which would come to take history and our understanding of the world in a new direction.
I have made a slight summary here, but to do justice to the book and the ideas it is necessary to consider each of the essays and suggestions in and of itself. In almost all the cases this will be worthwhile as there is much to learn from them. i.e. The speculations do not come out of the air but out of solid scientific understanding .
A number of the essays speculate on the end of illness and remarkably long lives. One speculates that the transformations will lead to a state of total satisfaction and happiness. This kind of idea seems to me again based on the kind of way human lives become meaningful through struggle, sacrifice, dedication , work and non- guaranteed outcomes.
For me the excitement of a collection of this kind is not in any expectation that it will give `the answer'. Rather it is in the play of ideas, the richness of possibility. There is a pleasure of reading and feeling minds `at the top of the game'telling us what they think.

5.0 out of 5 stars Very intellectually stimulating, March 18, 2009

By	J. Davis (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I enjoyed this book (actually a compilation of essays at the wonderful scientific websiteEdge.org). A number of prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran, and Freeman Dyson explain what they changed their mind on and why. I particularly enjoyed Dyson's essay, although his was about history, not science. (He discusses why the atomic bombs did not cause Japan to surrender). Anyone interested in science should not only get this book, they should frequent Edge.org.