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Edge 70 — June 15-19, 2000

(23,174 words)

[Excerpts from this edition of Edge are being simultaneously published inGerman by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [ Frank Schirrmacher,Publisher.]

THE THIRD CULTURE

THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTOBy David Gelernter

Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep ofintellectual landscape right in front of us.

THE REALITY CLUB

Stewart Brand, David Ditzel, John C. Dvorak, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson,Douglas Rushkoff, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier, David Farber, Danny Hillis,Vinod Khosla, John McCarthy on "The Second Coming - A Manifesto" by DavidGelernter

Marc Hauser, Milford Wolpoff, V.S. Ramachandran, and Nicholas Humphrey on V.S.Ramachandran's "Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind"the great leap forward" in human evolution"

THE THIRD CULTURE

THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTOBy David Gelernter

Introduction byJohn Brockman

David Gelernter .....

"...prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web. He understood the idea half a decadebefore it happened." (John Markoff)

"...is a treasure in the world of computer science...the most articulate andthoughtful of the great living practitioners" (Jaron Lanier)

"...is one of the pioneers in getting many computers to work together and cooperateon solving a single problem, which is the future of computing." (Danny Hillis)

"...is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." (BillJoy)

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter entered the public mind one morning inJanuary '92 when The New York Sunday Times ran his picture on the front page ofthe business section; it filled nearly the whole page. The text of the accompanyingstory occupied almost another whole page inside.

In 1991 Gelernter had published a book for technologists (an extended researchpaper) called Mirror Worlds, claiming in effect that one day, there would besomething like the Web. As well as forecasting the Web, the book, according to thepeople who built these systems, also helped lay the basis for the internetprogramming language "Java" and Sun Microsystems' "Jini."

Gelernter's earlier work on his parallel programming language "Linda" (which allowsyou to distribute a computer program across a multitude of processors and thusbreak down problems into a multitude of parts in order to solve them more quickly)and "tuple spaces" underlies such modern-day systems as Sun's JavaSpaces, IBM'sT-Spaces, a Lucent company's new "InfernoSpaces" and many other descendantsworldwide.

By mid-'92 this set of ideas had taken hold and was exerting a strong influence . By1993 the Internet was growing fast, and the Web was about to be launched.Gelernter's research group at Yale was an acknowledged world leader in networksoftware and more important, it was known for "The Vision Thing", for the bigpicture.

In June '93 everything stopped for Gelernter when he was critically injured by aterrorist mailbomb. He was out of action for the rest of '93 and most of '94 as theWeb took off, the Internet become an international phenomenon and his aggressiveforecasts started to come true. Gelernter endured numerous surgeries through 95,and then a long recuperation period.

Now Gelernter is back. In this audacious manifesto, "The Second Coming", hewrites: "Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificentsweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.""

— JB

DAVID GELERNTER, Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and adjunctfellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a leading figure in the third generation ofArtificial Intelligence scientists, known for his programming language called "Linda"that made it possible to link computers together to work on a single problem. Hehas since emerged as one of the seminal thinkers in the field known as parallel, ordistributed, computing.

He is the author of Mirror Worlds (1991), The Muse In The Machine (1994), 1939:The Lost World Of The Fair (1995), And Drawiing A Life: Surviving The Unabomber(1998).

Click here for David Gelernter's Edge Bio Page

THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTOBy David Gelernter

Any Microsecond Now

Computing will be transformed. It's not just that our problems are big, they are bigand obvious. It's not just that the solutions are simple, they are simple and rightunder our noses. It's not just that hardware is more advanced than software; thelast big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen years ago, andtoday's hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976.Users react to the hard truth that commerical software applications tend to bebadly-designed, badly-made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves("Computers for Morons," "Operating Systems for Livestock"), and meanwhile,money surges through our communal imagination like beer from burst barrels.Billions. Naturally the atmosphere is a little strange; change is coming, soon.

Everything Old Is New Again

1. No matter how certain its eventual coming, an event whose exact time and formof arrival are unknown vanishes when we picture the future. We tend not to believein the next big war or economic swing; we certainly don't believe in the next bigsoftware revolution.

2. Because we don't believe in technological change (we only say we do), we acceptbad computer products with a shrug; we work around them, make the best of themand (like fatalistic sixteenth-century French peasants) barely even notice theirdefects — instead of demanding that they be fixed and changed.

3. Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweepof intellectual landscape right in front of us.

4. The Orwell law of the future: any new technology that can be tried will be. LikeAdam Smith's invisible hand (leading capitalist economies toward ever-increasingwealth), Orwell's Law is an empirical fact of life.

Ripe Ready and hanging by a thread

5. We know that big developments are inevitable in the software world — if onlybecause nothing in that world corresponds to a "book." You can see a book wholefrom the outside. You know in advance how a book is laid out — where the contentsor the index will be — and how to "operate" one. As you work through it, you alwaysknow where you stand: how far you have gone and how much is left. "Book" can bea physical object or a text — an abstraction with many interchangeable physicalembodiments. These properties don't hold for file systems or web sites. You can'tsee or judge one from the outside, anticipate the lay-out, tell where you stand asyou work your way through.

Whenever we are organizing information, the book is too powerful an idea to dowithout in some form or other.

6. Miniaturization was the big theme in the first age of computers: rising power,

falling prices, computers for everybody. Theme of the Second Age now approaching:computing transcends computers. Information travels through a sea of anonymous,interchangeable computers like a breeze through tall grass. A dekstop computer is ascooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up likeseawater.

7. "The network is the computer" — yes; but we're less interested in computers allthe time. The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, not telescopes. The real topic incomputing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers weuse as telescopes and tuners.

8. The software systems we depend on most today are operating systems (Unix, theMacintosh OS, Windows et. al.) and browsers (Internet Explorer, NetscapeCommunicator...). Operating systems are connectors that fasten users tocomputers; they attach to the computer at one end, the user at the other. Browsersfasten users to remote computers, to "servers" on the internet.

Today's operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longerwant to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probablynever did). They want to be connected to information. In the future, people areconnected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos — alsoknown as the Swarm, the Cybersphere.

From The Prim Pristine Net To The Omnipresent Swarm

9. The computing future is based on "cyberbodies" — self-contained, neatly-ordered,beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens.

10. You will walk up to any "tuner" (a computer at home, work or the supermarket,or a TV, a telephone, any kind of electronic device) and slip in a "calling card," whichidentifes a cyberbody. The tuner tunes it in. The cyberbody arrives and settles in likea bluebird perching on a branch.

11. Your whole electronic life will be stored in a cyberbody. You can summon it toany tuner at any time.

12. By slipping it your calling card, you customize any electronic device you touch;for as long as it holds your card, the machine knows your habits and preferencesbetter than you know them yourself.

13. Any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a ``DisableOmniscience'' button.

14. The important challenge in computing today is to spend computing power, nothorde it.

16. The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lushgrowths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merelya big crowd. The individuals in the swarm lose their identities. The computers thatmake up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of theCybersphere. Within the swarm, individual computers will be as anonymous asmolecules of air.

17. A cyberbody can be replicated or distributed over many computers; can inhabitmany computers at the same time. If the Cybersphere's computers are tiles in apaved courtyard, a cyberbody is a cloud's drifting shadow covering many tilessimultaneously.

18. But the Net will change radically before it dies. When you deal with a remoteweb site, you largely bypass the power of your desktop in favor of the far-off powerof a web server. Using your powerful desktop computer as a mere channel to reach

web sites, reaching through and beyond it instead of using it, is like renting aHyundai and keeing your Porsche in the garage. Like executing programs out of diskstorage instead of main memory and cache. The Web makes the desktop impotent.

19. The power of desktop machines is a magnet that will reverse today's "everythingonto the Web!" trend. Desktop power will inevitably drag information out of remoteservers onto desktops.

20. If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn't that mean that wemust have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could movethe site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination. The "site" islike a military unit in the field, the general moving with his troops (or like a hockeyteam in constant swarming motion). (We used essentially this technique to build thefirst tuple space implementations. They seemed to depend on a shared server, butthe server was an illusion; there was no server, just a swarm of clients.) CouldAmazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed Central Command Post? Yes.

Stranger Than Fiction: Computers Today

21. The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface, invented by Xerox and Appleand now universal, was a brilliant invention and is now obsolete. It wastes screen-space on meaningless images, fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside thefiles represented by those blurry little images, forces users to choose icons for thedesktop when the system could choose them better itself, and keeps users jockeyingwindows (like parking attendants rearranging cars in a pint-sized Manhattan lot) in alosing battle for an unimpeded view of the workspace — which is, ultimately,unattainable. No such unimpeded view exists.

22. Icons and "collapsed views" seem new but we have met them before. Any bookhas a "collapsed" or "iconified" view, namely its spine. An icon conveys far lessinformation that the average book spine — and is much smaller. should it be muchsmaller? Might a horizontal stack of "book spines" onscreen be more useful than aclutter of icons?

23. The computer mouse was a brilliant invention, but we can see today that it is abad design. Like any device that must be moved and placed precisely, it ought toprovide tactile feedback; it doesn't.

24. Metaphors have a profound effect on computing. The desktop metaphor traps usin a "broad" instead of "deep" arrangement of information that is fundamentallywrong for computer screens. Compared to a standard page of words, an actualdesktop is big and a computer screen is small. A desktop is easily extended (usedrawers, other desks, tables, the floor); a computer screen is not.

25. Apple could have described its interface as a pure "information landscape," withno connection to a desktop; we invented this landscape (they might have explained)the way a landscape architect or amusement park designer invents a landscape. Weinvented an ideal space for seeing and managing computerized information. Ourlandscape is imaginary, but you can still enter and move around it. The computerscreen is the window of your vehicle, the face-shield of your diving-helmet.

26. Under the desktop metaphor, the screen IS the interface — the interface is asquare foot or two of glowing colors on a glass panel. In the landscape metaphor,the screen is just a viewing pane. When you look through it, you see the actualinterface lying beyond.

Problems On The Surface And Under The Surface

27. Modern computing is based on an analogy between computers and file cabinetsthat is fundamentally wrong and affects nearly every move we make. (We store"files" on disks, write "records," organize files into "folders" — file-cabinet

language.) Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can takeaction.

28. Metaphors have a profound effect on computing: the file-cabinet metaphor trapsus in a "passive" instead of "active" view of information management that isfundamentally wrong for computers.

29. The rigid file and directory system you are stuck with on your Mac or PC wasdesigned by programmers for programmers — and is still a good system forprogrammers. It is no good for non-programmers. It never was, and was neverintended to be.

30. If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle,don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer isridiculous.

31. Our standard policy on file names has far-reaching consequences: doesn'tmerely force us to make up names where no name is called for; also imposes stronglimits on our handling of an important class of documents — ones that arrive fromthe outside world. A newly-arrived email message (for example) can't stand on itsown as a separate document — can't show up alongside other files in searches, sitby itself on the desktop, be opened or printed independently; it has no name, so itmust be buried on arrival inside some existing file (the mail file) that does have aname. The same holds for incoming photos and faxes, Web bookmarks, scannedimages...

32. You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach outand take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six should reach out and grab itautomatically, simultaneously.

33. A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many filesshould be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to be in no directory,one directory, or many directories. Many files should be allowed to share onedirectory. Of these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five arebanned — for no good reason.

Streams Of Time

34. In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today theydeal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly withtangible time — time made visible and concrete. Chronologies and timelines tend tobe awkward in the off-computer world of paper, but they are natural online.

35. Computers make alphabetical order obsolete.

36. File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We couldmodel computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if wewanted to.

37. Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized intofolders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think ofa face: you've retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) Youcan see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future.Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classifyinformation when it is taken out. (Yesterday afternoon at four you stood withNatasha on Fifth Avenue in the rain — as you might recall when you are thinkingabout "Fifth Avenue," "rain," "Natasha" or many other things. But you attached nosuch labels to the memory when you acquired it. The classification happenedretrospectively.)

38. A "lifestream" organizes information not as a file cabinet does but roughly as a

mind does.

39. A lifestream is a sequence of all kinds of documents — all the electronicdocuments, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, emailmessages and every other digital information chunk in your life — arranged fromoldest to youngest, constantly growing as new documents arrive, easy to browseand search, with a past, present and future, appearing on your screen as a recedingparade of index cards. Documents have no names and there are no directories; youretrieve elements by content: "Fifth Avenue" yields a sub-stream of every documentthat mentions Fifth Avenue.

40. A stream flows because time flows, and the stream is a concrete representationof time. The "now" line divides past from future. If you have a meeting at 10AMtomorow, you put a reminder document in the future of your stream, at 10AMtomorrow. It flows steadily towards now. When now equals 10AM tomorrow, thereminder leaps over the now line and flows into the past. When you look at thefuture of your stream you see your plans and appointments, flowing steadily out ofthe future into the present, then the past.

41. You manage a lifestream using two basic controls, put and focus, whichcorrespond roughly to acquiring a new memory and remembering an old one.

42. To send email, you put a document on someone else's stream. To add a note toyour calendar, you put a document in the future of your own stream. To continuework on an old document, put a copy at the head of your stream. Sending email,updating the calendar, opening a document are three instances of the sameoperation (put a document on a stream).

43. A substream (for example the "Fifth Avenue" substream) is like a conventionaldirectory — except that it builds itself, automatically; it traps new documents asthey arrive; one document can be in many substreams; and a substream has thesame structure as the main stream — a past, present and future; steady flow.

In The Age Of Tangible Time

44. The point of lifestreams isn't to shift from one software structure to another butto shift the whole premise of computerized information: to stop building glorified filecabinets and start building (simplified, abstract) artificial minds; and to store ourelectronic lives inside.

45. A lifestream can replace the desktop and subsume the functions of the filesystem, email system and calendar system. You can store a movie, TV station,virtual museum, electronic store, course of instruction at any level, electronicauction or an institution's past, present and future (its archives, its current newsand its future plans) in a lifestream. Many websites will be organized as lifestreams.

46. The lifestream (or some other system with the same properties) will become themost important information-organizing structure in computing — because even arough imitation of the human mind is vastly more powerful than the mostsophisticated file cabinet ever conceived.

47. Lifestreams (in preliminary form) are a successful commercial product today, butmy predictions have nothing to do with this product. Ultimately the product maysucceed or fail. The idea will succeed.

Living Timestreams

48. Lifestreams today are conventional information structures, stored at web sitesand tuned-in using browsers. In the future they will be cyberbodies.

49. Today's operating systems connect users to computers. In the future we will

deal directly with information, in the form of cyberbodies. Operating systems willconnect cyberbodies to computers; will allow cyberbodies to dock on computers.Users won't deal with operating systems any more, and won't care about them. Yourcomputer's operating system will make as much difference to you as the voltagelevel of a bit in memory.

50. A lifestream is a landscape you can navigate or fly over at any level. Flyingtowards the start of the stream is "time travel" into the past.

45. You can walk alongside a lifestream (browsing or searching) or you can jump inand be immersed in information.

51. A well-designed store or public building allows you to size up the whole spacefrom outside, or as soon as you walk in — you see immediately how things are laidout and roughly how large and deep the space is. Today's typical web site is a failurebecause it is opaque. You ought to be able to see immediately (not deduce orcalculate) how the site is arranged, how big it is, how deep and how broad. It oughtto be transparent. (For an example of a "transparent" web site, Mirror Worlds —figure 7.6.)

52. Movies, TV shows, virtual museums and all sorts of other cultural products fromsymphonies to baseball games will be stored in lifestreams. In other words: eachcultural product will be delivered to you in the form of an artifical mind. You will dealwith it not as you deal with an object but roughly as you do with a person.

Institutions Afloat In The Cybersphere

53. Your car, your school, your company and yourself are all one-track vehiclesmoving forward through time, and they will each leave a stream-shaped cyberbody(like an aircraft's contrail) behind them as they go. These vapor-trails of crystallizedexperience will represent our first concrete answer to a hard question: what is acompany, a university, any sort of ongoing organization or institution, if its staff andcustomers and owners can all change, its buildings be bulldozed, its site relocated —what's left? What is it? The answer: a lifestream in cyberspace.

54. A software or service company equals the employees plus the companylifestream. Every employee has his own view of the communal stream. Thecompany's web site is the publically-accessible substream of the main companystream. The company's lifestream is an electronic approximation of the company'smemories, its communal mind.

50. Lifestreams don't yield the "paperless office." (The "paperless office" is a badidea because paper is one of the most useful and valuable media ever invented.) Butlifestreams can turn office paper into a temporary medium — for use, not storage."On paper" is a good place for information you want to use; a bad place forinformation you want to store. In the stream-based office, for each newly-created or-received paper document: scan it into the stream and throw it away. When youneed a paper document: find it in the stream; print it out; use it; if you wrote onthe paper while using it, scan it back in; throw it ou

55. Software can solve hard problems in two ways: by algorithm or by makingconnections — by delivering the problem to exactly the right human problem-solver.The second technique is just as powerful as the first, but so far we have ignored it.

The Second Coming Of The Computer

56. Lifestreams and microcosms are the two most important cyberbody types; theyrelate to each other as a single musical line relates to a single chord. The stream isa "moment in space," the microcosm a moment in time.

57. Nowadays we use a scanner to transfer a document's electronic image into a

computer. Soon, the scanner will become a Cybersphere port of entry, an all-purpose in-box. Put any object in the in-box and the system develops an accurate3D physical transcription, and drops the transcription into the cool dark well ofcyberspace. So the Cybersphere starts to take on just a hint of the textural richnessof real life.

We'll know the system is working when a butterfly wanders into the in-box and (afew wingbeats later) flutters out — and in that brief interval the system hastranscribed the creature's appearance and analyzed its way of moving, and the realbutterfly leaves a shadow-butterfly behind. Some time soon afterward you'll beexamining some tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear atthe bottom left corner of your screen (maybe a Hamearis lucina) and pause there,briefly hiding the text (and showing its neatly-folded rusty-chocolate wings likeVictorian paisley, with orange eyespots) — and moments later will have crossed thescreen and be gone.

But What Does It All Matter?

58. If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is that you nolonger need to think about money. In the future we will have plenty of technology —and the best consequence will be that we will no longer have to think abouttechnology.

We will return with gratitude and relief to the topics that actually count.

EDGE IN THE NEWS

The New York Times Critic Sees Flaws in Microsoft's StrategyAn Influential Scientist CallsFocus on Web Browsing a Mistake By John MarkoffJune 19, 2000

Mr. Gelernter's argument is spelled out in "The Second Coming -- a Manifesto," anessay published last week in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,and posted on the Edge, a technology forum on he Web (www.edge.org).

As Microsoft prepares to announce its Next Generation Windows Services initiativethis week, an influential computer scientist is circulating a thesis that challengesWilliam H. Gates's vision of the future. .......

.Microsoft has based its reputation on refusing to lead and always following, andonce again they're behind the wave here," said Mr. Gelernter, a respected YaleUniversity computer scientist. "More and more people are coming to understand thatthe power of desktop machines is enormous and is largely wasted when you spendyour time browsing on the Web.

Mr. Gelernter's argument is spelled out in "The Second Coming -- a Manifesto," anessay published last week in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,and posted on the Edge, a technology forum on he Web (www.edge.org).

Mr. Gelernter's critique has some influential supporters, including including DannyHillis, a computer scientist who recently left Walt Disney's Imagineering researchgroup to form a new company, Applied Minds; David Ditzel, a computer designerwho is the founder of Transmeta Inc., a Silicon Valley microprocessor company; andRodney

Brooks, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial IntelligenceLaboratory."David's criticisms of our current computing environments are eloquentlystated, and I think widely shared," Mr. Brooks wrote in a recent comment posted onthe Internet.

But Microsoft's head of research, Rick Rashid, countered that Mr. Gelernter wastaking a long-term view of computing that might have little relevance for the currentsoftware market. "It's fairly predictable that David would be saying this," said Mr.Rashid, a Microsoft senior vice president. This has been his mantra throughout hiscareer. ........

Click here for the article on "THE NEW YORK TIMES on the Web"

THE REALITY CLUB

Stewart Brand, David Ditzel, John C. Dvorak, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson,Douglas Rushkoff, Rod Brooks, Lee Smolin, Jaron Lanier, David Farber, Danny Hillis,Vinod Kholsa, John McCarthy on "The Second Coming - A Manifesto" by DavidGelernter

Marc Hauser, Milford Wolpoff, V.S. Ramachandran, and Nicholas Humphrey on V.S.Ramachandran's "Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind"the great leap forward" in human evolution"

THE REALITY CLUB

Responses to "The Second Coming - A Manifesto" by David Gelernter

Stewart Brand: The sequence is clear. From "the user is a luser" (early programmerjoke) to "the user wins" to "the user rules" (eg. Napster) and "the user creates" (theWeb) to, with Gelertner, "the user is the system."

David Ditzel: Gelernter is ahead of us all in peering through the fog that we call thefuture of technology.

John C. Dvorak: Bill Gates will love reading this stuff. Hating it will be the Ellisonsand McNealys of the world whose goal is to de-ball the personal computer andreplace it with a thin client running eunuchs.

Feeman Dyson: I suspect that he has a one-sided view of computing. I suspect thatcyberspace will also be dominated by tools, as far into the future as we can imagine.The topography of our future cyberspace will be determined more by new tools thanby Gelernter's vision.

George Dyson: Let us hope that Gelernter's prophecies continue to be fulfilled. Thesooner spines replace icons the better — would you rather work in a library wherethe books are shelved at eye-level or left lying face-up all over the floor??

Douglas Rushkoff: ...the trick to seeing through today's interfaces — a way ofenvisioning information architecture that David does effortlessly — involvesdistinguishing between our modeling systems and the models they build.

Rod Brooks: David Gelernter is no doubt right on about the coming revolution, butas with all revolutions it is hard to predict the details of how it will play out. Isuspect he is wrong on the details of cyberbodies and his lifestreams.

Lee Smolin: I have the sense that David's manifesto is a bit like the predictions Iread as a child that by the 21st century cars would have evolved wings and we

would all be flying to work. The technology of cars has improved a bit since then,but the basic experience of driving is almost exactly the same.

Jaron Lanier: This reminds of Marx's vision of what should happen after therevolution. He imagined we'd be reading the classics and practicing archery!Idealists always believe there's some more meaningful, less dreary plane ofexistence that can be found in this life.

David Farber: We are at the edge of a real dramatic change in technology. For thepast decade we have evolved from a view that the network is just a way ofconnecting computers together to the current view that the network is the action tothe view often stated (by me and others) that no one cares about the network butonly what they can access and interact with — information and people.

Danny Hillis:David Gelernter is basically right: current generation computerinterfaces are not very good. (Since we are all among friends here, we can say it:they suck).

Vinod Kholsa: Transition strategies here will significantly impact the end state.

John McCarthy: Unfortunately, the making of computer systems and software isdominated by the ideology of the omnipotent programmer (or web site designer)who knows how the user (regarded as a child) should think and reduces the user'scontrol to pointing and clicking. This ideology has left even the most sophisticatedusers in a helpless position compared to where they were 40 years ago in the late1950s.

From: Stewart BrandDate: June 11, 2000

It's a great screed, inspiring and generative. It is a frame of reference worth fillingwith reality.

For me, Gelertner's manifesto speaks to widespread growing aggravation with thecurrent system and growing impatience with the burgeoning tech possibilities notbeing addressed at a deep enough level. "About time!" was my gut response.

The sequence is clear. From "the user is a luser" (early programmer joke) to "theuser wins" to "the user rules" (eg. Napster) and "the user creates" (the Web) to,with Gelertner, "the user is the system."

The still unanswered question though is: How does this system fare over time? Howdoes it keep from the self-obsolescing self-erasure endemic to current computertech? How do the lifestream contrails keep their shape amid ferociously turbulentwinds? Those winds are not extraneous to the system; they are how the systemgrows.

STEWART BRAND is founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well,cofounder of Global Business Network, cofounder and president of The Long NowFoundation. He is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, Author Of TheMedia Lab: Inventing The Future At Mit, How Buildings Learn, and The Clock Of TheLong Now: Time And Responsibility (MasterMinds Series).

From: David DitzelDate: June 11, 2000

David Gelernter's Manifesto is a humbling document read, because it points out thegenerally unrecognized, but herein revealed truth that we are only at the beginning

of understanding how the evolution of the internet is going to change our lives.

Gelernter is ahead of us all in peering through the fog that we call the future oftechnology.

DAVID DITZEL is CEO, Transmeta Corporation

From: John C. DvorakDate: June 12, 2000

Finally, someone who knows what they're talking about and who isn't simply viewedas a embittered cynic tells it like it is regarding the notion of remote computingamong other dumb ideas. Bill Gates will love reading this stuff. Hating it will be theEllisons and McNealys of the world whose goal is to de-ball the personal computerand replace it with a thin client running eunuchs. I also like his slamming thedubious concept of a computer "Desktop" and trashing the idea of file folders andother computer commonplaces promoted by the charismatic Steve Jobs and copiedlockstep by Gates and company. Unfortunately all the points in the manifesto areright but otiose. Trends and fads promoted by strength of personality whether it beFascism, rap music, thong bikinis or the WIMP (windows icons mouse pointer)interface are not easy to reverse. It's the mechanism of trend reversal that needsstudy and comment. A laundry list of all that is wrong with computing today is anexercise in futility when hero worship and sheep-like behavior are the norm. Thismanifesto will amount to nothing in the end. A shame.

JOHN C. DVORAK is the host of Silicon Spin on ZDTV. He is a contributing editor ofPC Magazine, where he has been writing two columns, including the popular "InsideTrack," since 1986.

From: Freeman DysonDate: June 12, 2000

Thank you very much for sending the Gelernter manifesto, full of wonderful imageryand eloquence. Here are some brief comments.

Gelernter lays out a grand vision of cyberbodies and lifestreams inhabiting thecyberspace of the future. He brings his vision to life with images that every child canunderstand, the bluebird perching on a branch, the cloud's shadow drifting acrossthe paved courtyard. There will be a place for humans, even for children, in hiscyberspace. In his vision of the future, we shall no longer be parking cars in a pint-sized Manhattan parking-lot. We shall be flying free in cyberspace, leaving behindvapor trails of experience and memory for other humans to explore.

Fifty years ago we heard about a different vision of a possible future. We heard thatthe automobile would soon be obsolete, its mobility diminished by the constantlyincreasing density of traffic, its destructive effect on the environment no longertolerable in a civilized society. We heard that the automobile would soon be replacedby the helicopter as the preferred vehicle for personal transportation. We wouldsoon be living in a three dimensional world, with helipads replacing garages besideour homes. The reasons why that vision of a roadless civilization never materializedare obvious. Helicopters remained noisy, accident-prone and expensive, roads andautomobiles turned out to be unexpectedly resilient. The vision was beautiful, butthe tools to make it real were defective.

Gelernter's vision is also beautiful, and his scornful sweeping of existing computersand operating systems into the dustbin of history is persuasive. The chief question

that his vision raises is, whether we shall have the tools to make it real. Gelernterdisparages tools. He says, "The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, nottelescopes. The real topic in computing is the cybersphere and the cyberstructuresin it, not the computers ... ''. I know more about astronomy than about computing. Ican certify that he has a one-sided view of astronomy. Modern astronomy isdominated by tools. It is about telescopes and spacecraft as much as it is about thecosmos that these tools explore. Every time we introduce a new tool, we see a newcosmos. And I suspect that he has a one-sided view of computing. I suspect thatcyberspace will also be dominated by tools, as far into the future as we can imagine.The topography of our future cyberspace will be determined more by new tools thanby Gelernter's vision. Still, he has pointed the way for the next generation of toolbuilders to follow. We must hope that they will be more successful than the buildersof helicopters fifty years ago. If the tool-builders can build tools to match his vision,then our children and grandchildren might see the Second Coming and live in theworld of Gelernter's dreams.

FREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, inPrinceton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among hismany books are Disturbing The Universe, Infinite In All Directions Origins Of Life,From Eros To Gaia, Imagined Worlds, And The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet.

From: George DysonDate: June 12, 2000

Let us hope that Gelernter's prophecies continue to be fulfilled. The sooner spinesreplace icons the better — would you rather work in a library where the books areshelved at eye-level or left lying face-up all over the floor??

For fifty years, digital computing has rested upon two invariant foundations: theprogram (as given by Turing) and the address matrix (as given by von Neumannand Bigelow). Who could have imagined, 50 years ago, that we would load millionsof lines of 'machine-building' code just to check our mail, or that an internationalpolitical organization would be charged with supervising the orderly assignment ofunambiguous coordinates to every bit of memory connected to the net?

Only a third miracle — dirt-cheap, near-perfect microprocessing — allows a systemas inherently intolerant of error and ambiguity to work as well as it does today.Gelernter is right: a revolution is overdue. And underway.

In molecular biology, addressing of data and execution of order codes isaccomplished by reference to local templates, not by reference to some absolute orhierarchical system of numerical address. The instructions say "do x with the nextcopy of y that comes along" — without specifying which copy, or where. This abilityto take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is exactly theability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organismsfrom information processing in digital computers. This is not to suggest anoverthrow of the address matrix — which is with us to stay. But software that takesadvantage of template-based addressing will rapidly gain the upper hand.

The other foundation, the program, is based on the fact that digital computers areable to solve most — but not all — problems that can be stated in finite,unambiguous terms. They may, however, take a very long time to produce ananswer (in which case you build faster computers) or it may take a very long time toask the question (in which case you hire more programmers). For fifty years,computers have been getting better and better at providing answers — but only toquestions that programmers are able to ask.

I am not talking about non-computable problems. Despite the perennial attentions

of philosophers, in the day-to-day world such problems remain scarce. There is,however, a third sector to the computational universe: the realm of questions whoseanswers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask inunambiguous language that computers can understand. This is where brains beatcomputers. In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier thandefining the question. It's easier to draw something that looks like a cat than todescribe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribblesindiscriminately, and eventually something appears that happens to resemble a cat.A solution finds the problem, not the other way around. The world starts makingsense, and the meaningless scribbles are left behind. This is the power of that MirrorWorld we now perceive as the Internet and the World Wide Web.

"An argument in favor of building a machine with initial randomness is that, if it islarge enough, it will contain every network that will ever be required," advisedcryptanalyst Irving J. Good, speaking at IBM in 1958. Even a relatively simplenetwork contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not beexplicitly defined. The network can — and will — answer questions that all theprogrammers in the world would never have time to ask.

GEORGE DYSON is a leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut kayaks ¦thesubject of his book Baidarka, numerous articles, and a segment of the PBStelevision show Scientific American Frontiers. His early life and work was portrayedin 1978 by Kenneth Brower in his classic dual biography, The Starship And TheCanoe. Now ranging more widely as a historian of technology, Dyson's most recentbook is Darwin Among The Machines.

From: Douglas RushkoffDate: June 12, 2000

David Gelernter's "The Second Coming" reminds me just how arbitrarily so many ofour decisions about how to do computing and networking have been reached.Techniques for sharing super-computing resources or keeping lines of code ready fora compiler have, through their very legacies, become the architectural basis forhumanity's shared information space.

It seems to me that the trick to seeing through today's interfaces — a way ofenvisioning information architecture that David does effortlessly — involvesdistinguishing between our modeling systems and the models they build. Whilememory, information, hardware, and software might need to conform to certainrealities, the very opacity of our current operating systems (both technological andsocial) imply an immutability that just isn't real. The only obstacles to thisunencumbered perception of memory, information, storage, and interaction are ourown prejudices, formed either randomly or by long-obsolete priorities, and kept inplace by market forces.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, a Professor of Media Culture at New York University'sInteractive Telecommunications Program, is an author, lecturer, and social theorist.His books include Free Rides, Cyberia: Life In The Trenches Of Hyperspace, TheGenx Reader (Editor), Media Virus! Hidden Agendas In Popular Culture, Ecstasy Club(A Novel), Playing The Future, and Coercion: Why We Listen To What "They" Say.

From: Rodney BrooksDate: June 13, 2000

David Gelernter is no doubt right on about the coming revolution, but as with allrevolutions it is hard to predict the details of how it will play out. I suspect he is

wrong on the details of cyberbodies and his lifestreams. The first because as framedit relies still on a physical icon to identify the body, and the second because it is justone metaphor that many will find inconvenient. In the following paragraphs I'lloutline my own versions of what the revolution will bring in these two departments,and no doubt my visions will be as wrong or more than David's.

But first the actuality of the revolution. David's criticisms of our current computingenvironments are eloquently stated, and I think widely shared. A number of projectswere started about a year ago, originally through a DARPA sponsored `ComputingExpeditions' program. At CMU the expedition is called "Aura", at Berkely it is"Endeavour" (named for Cook's ship, and hence the spelling), at the University ofWashington/Xerox Parc it is called "Portolano/Workscapes". At MIT, MichaelDertouzos, Anant Agarwal and I are leading "Project Oxygen" dedicated to pervasivehuman-centered computing. The common theme across all these projects is thathuman time and attention is the limiting factor in the future, not computation speed,bandwidth, or storage.

In the past the human has been forced to climb into the computer's world. First withbinary, and holes punched in cards, and then later by physically approaching that"square foot or two of glowing colors on a glass panel", and being drawn into itsvirtual desktop with metaphors bogged down by copies of physical constraints inreal offices. In MIT's Project Oxygen, a joint project of the Laboratory for ComputerScience and the Artificial Intelligence Lab, we are trying to drag the computer outinto the world of people. Computers are fast enough now to see and hear---andthese are the principal modalities which we use to interact with other people. We aremaking our machines interact with people through these same modalities, using theperceptual capabilities of people rather than forcing them to rely on their cognitiveabilities just to handle the interface. Cognitive capabilities should be reserved for thereal things that people want to do.

Now for cyberbodies and lifestreams. By making computation people centric itshould not matter whether I am in your office or mine, whether I pick up your PDAor mine, whether I pick up your cell phone or mine. Wherever I am the systemshould adapt to my identity whether I am carrying a "calling card" or not. It shouldadapt to me, not to yet another technological decoration that I need to carryaround. And it should be automatic and secure as it does this. Just as people can tellmy identity through vision and sound so too can our machines. Furthermore, ascomputation is cheap, much cheaper these days than special purpose circuitry (andwherever that is not true yet, it will soon be), there is no need for artifacts to haveany particular identity. According to my needs at that instant, the machine in myhand should be able to morph from being a PDA to a cell phone, to an MP3/Napsterplayer, just be changing the digital signal processing it is doing. Physics requires alittle bit in the way of an aerial, but beyond that demodulation, etc., can be insoftware. And then the systems should handle bandwidth restrictions behind myback, performing vertical hand-off between protocols as invisibly as today's cellphones perform horizontal hand-off between cells.

Lifestreams are one sort of metaphor. We will not be subject to the tyranny of asingle metaphor as we are subject today to the desktop metaphor which Gelernterso masterfully scorns. For a lot of my everyday work I will prefer a metaphor of apersonal assistant. I tell it something, and it takes care of the details, watching overme and only interceding when it sees that I need help, pulling in all the necessaryinformation from wherever it is located, perhaps cached ahead of time inanticipation of my needs. After working with me for many years my human personalassistant knows so many details of my life and interactions that I can entrust her tohandle many of interactions with the world, without me ever providing anysupervision. I will want a similar relationship with my computation. Others mightprefer a geographical metaphor, zooming around through a virtual world, while afew might like the lifestreams metaphor. Once a few of these metaphors getinvented and tried out, there will be a deluge of new metaphors as the younghackers attack the interface problem with a vengeance.

RODNEY A. BROOKS is Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, andFujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief TechnicalOfficer of IS Robotics, an 85 person robotics company. Dr. Brooks also appeared asone of the four principals in the Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control"(named after one of his papers in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society)in 1997 (one of Roger Ebert's 10 best films of the year).

From: Lee Smolin Date: June 13, 2000

David Gelernter has a wonderful imagination and I am a bit afraid to contradict him,as he has obviously spent much more time thinking about the future of computingthan I have. I am intrigued by many of the things he proposes. But let me say aword in defense of the present Macintosh system. I do suspect that some computerscientists have forgotten just how revolutionary and useful the Mac operatingsystem is, and may be underestimating the longevity of this particular technology.

It is true that the Macintosh operating system is based on the old fashionedmetaphor of a desktop and filing cabinet. But I find that metaphor very useful. I dothink of my computer as a very efficient and useful filing cabinet. I like the fact thatthe files have names and that I can search for them efficiently in several differentways. I like the hierarchical structure of directories. I like the fact that email isdifferent from ordinary files, and I am happy that it only takes a few key strokes toturn an email into a file if I need it to be one, or vise versa.

I also like the limited area of the desktop on my powerbook screen. At work I have aSilicon Graphics which works a bit more like David wants: one can have manydifferent desktops for different purposes and each can be much bigger than thescreen, even though that is many times the size of the screen on my powerbook.But I find that I don't use any of these added features. It is too hard to rememberhow to use them, and I find that when I try to I often loose windows and iconswhich are off the screen. What is good about the desktop is that it is so limited. Ican have piles of windows open at once, but I know where they all are. When thereare too many I know I have to close some, which forces me to do a bit of cleaningup. It is like having to clean up ones desk when it overflows. Only unlike my realdesk, which I can simply ignore, I do have to deal with my desktop and clean it upfrom time to time to keep working. I find this very useful as it enforces a minimallevel of organization in my work habits.

What David is describing is a computer which would work more like my own mind.But I am not sure I need a computer of this kind. Perhaps I do, I've never had one.But I do already have quite a good associative memory. My guess is that itslimitations are built in, as there is an inevitable compromise between the vividnessof memory and associations and alertness to the present. I would not want going tomy computer to work to be like opening a box of old letters and photographs orfacing the task of throwing away old magazines that I never got to read. With acomputer like this I might never get anything done. More than anything what I likeabout my computer is that it does not offer me any information that I don't ask for.

What has gotten so distasteful about going on line is the imposition of unwantedinformation. The web was a lot more useful before pages began to be crowded withadvertising and unwanted information. The sites I use mostly are the ones that offerthe least possibilities for diversion from what I am seeking. If randomness andunpredictability were built into the experience of computing it would cease tobecome a useful tool for me. Not enough has been said about the way that one sitecan change the working habits of a whole profession, by changing the way wecommunicate with each other. This is true of the xxx.lanl.gov site, which is now the

universal tool for publication in physics and math. It is tightly and rigidly structured,and that is what makes it so useful. It is an extremely good filing cabinet, so goodthat it replaces many filing cabinets in thousands of offices all over the world.

I also don't like the metaphor of organizing my interface with the computer in termsof the flow of real time. Another very good aspect of my computer is that it providesthe illusion that time can be frozen. I can work on several projects at once, andeach one is exactly where I left it when I go back to it. In the context of a very busylife, full of travel and unexpected demands and developments, my computerprovides an oasis in which time advances in each window only when I pay attentionto it.

So I don't need a computer to enhance my imagination or associative memory. Ineed a computer that counteracts the effects of my own too active imagination andtoo busy schedule. Because of this I know that a computer that works the way mypowerbook does is something I will always need. And what makes my powerbook souseful is the fact that it works so differently than I do. The fact that all the files havenames and locations in a hierarchical system is part of what makes it so useful.When I want to find a paper I wrote three years ago on quantum geometry I wantto be able to pull up that file right away, not every file I wrote in the last five yearsabout some aspect of quantum geometry. Every once in a while I loose somethingand it might be good to have a search machine that worked associatively. But notvery often.

I do agree with a lot of what David says. I can imagine lots of improvements on thepresent Mac operating system. Some of the things he suggests would be veryuseful. And of course the idea of a kind of cyber-agent who represents me incyberspace is intriguing and perhaps useful. But I have the sense that David'smanifesto is a bit like the predictions I read as a child that by the 21st century carswould have evolved wings and we would all be flying to work. The technology ofcars has improved a bit since then, but the basic experience of driving is almostexactly the same. Personally I don't cherish that experience so I prefer living inplaces where one can get almost everywhere by public transportation. Here inLondon at the beginning of the 21st century the only people who helicopter to workregularly are a few wealthy businessmen and a few members of the royal family.

LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist; professor of physics and member of theCenter for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University;author of The Life of the Cosmos.

From: Jaron Lanier Date: June 13, 2000

I'm so delighted that David is still fighting the good fight, an idealist after all theseyears. Greed and even satisfied wealth have proven to be agents of distraction to alltoo many cyberdreamers. It's becoming ever more rare to find a young student witheven half of David's quotient of fire in his/her soul about the potential for beautyand meaning in digital tools.

So, while I will offer some criticisms below, I hope they will be read as friendly andsupportive.

David falls into a common trap that has snagged many a visionary over the years.He thinks about ideal Platonic computers instead of real computers. A billion Platoniccomputers support a seamless virtual space in which programs fly aboutunconcerned with which real computer might be visited at a given moment. A billionreal computers, in contrast, require a ten million human beings to run helpdesks,many thousands more to fight lawsuits over software compatibility, and a fewhundred more to track malicious viruses that invade the automated virus tracking

software that never quite worked.

Real computers, unlike ideal computers, are the first machines that require aninfinite rather than a finite amount of human labor for their maintenance. Realcomputers are less likely to allow us to forget them than any other gadget in thehistory of invention.

Furthermore, in order for a Platonic computer to appear, human good will and goodtaste will have to precede it. There will have to be no Bill Gates who forcestechnological sensibility into a retrograde motion in order to gain power.

In order for a Platonic computer to appear, humans will have to understand how towrite large programs that interface with the real world in such a way that they areboth modifiable, secure, immune to becoming the bearers of future legacyheadaches, and amenable to decent user interface design. We simply don't knowhow to write such programs yet. I expect us to learn to do it someday, in the sameway I expect us to be able to build anti-gravity devices someday. I am idealistic, butnot for progress in any relevant timeframe.

Moore's Law simply doesn't apply to software as it does to hardware. Software usesevery opportunity to get worse instead of better. More memory means more bloat.More users means more incentives not to change, which means more legacyhighwire Band-Aids. Software is like culture, starting out fresh and becomingdecadent.

Having said all that, I love David's vision. Reading it inspired me to dig up a bit ofmy old ranting about what virtual reality software should look like. As it happens, Iwas hoping for something very much like Lifestreams back in the mid-80s.*

(*See http://www.advanced.org/jaron/vrint.html)

As I re-read this old material now, about fifteen years later, it seems a little naive.Surely I didn't think I'd play back virtualized memories as if they were on tape, fast-forwarding and reversing. That works for a single movie, but is no more possible fora lifetime than naming all those 10,000 cows. How would I break memories intoatomic units so that they could be summarized or re-ordered? Would I just see alittle bit of each room I entered? Maybe rooms aren't the right divider markers formemories. I'd have to impose some ontology onto my memories in order to be ableto reduce them enough to search through them and manipulate them. I can't dealwith my memories in an unreduced form, because I don't have the time. (This is thetemporal version of the old Borges story about the map as big as the country itrepresents.) The fact that my memories must be automatically reduced in order tobe usable brings up another problem area in David's vision.

Although it isn't immediately apparent, there's a an implicit reliance on ArtificialIntelligence in David's manifesto. Somehow the cybertraces that one leaves as oneflits about the cyberuniverse, carefree like a butterfly, must at some point be parsed(according to that magic ontology) to be useable in the future. Either there's asweatshop of third world workers going over the life experiences of every wiredcitizen of the industrialized world, or there are computer algorithms doing the job.

Maybe by now my colleagues on this list are sick of my unyielding stance on AI, butI must repeat once again that Artificial Intelligence just stinks. It's a phony effect.You can't get something for nothing; the computer can't add wisdom to the mix. Orif you believe it can, I feel you've reduced yourself in a deep way, morally andesthetically. Think of the Turing Test: How can the judge know if the computer hasgotten smart or if the person has gotten stupid? How can you know if thoseomniscient credit rating algorithms are brilliant, or if you're being an idiot byborrowing money when you don't need to in order to feed the algorithm with data?

Once again, I feel a tension between the ideal and the real. I am sold on the

Lifestreams vision, on David's whole package, but I think the experience of using itwill be extremely labor intensive, for me and for everybody.

And utterly worth all the trouble.

I must reject the final paragraph of the manifesto, which imagines an aspect of lifemore meaningful than technology, which we will be free to pursue when we canforget about technology. This reminds of Marx's vision of what should happen afterthe revolution. He imagined we'd be reading the classics and practicing archery!Idealists always believe there's some more meaningful, less dreary plane ofexistence that can be found in this life. All we have to do is fix this hunking mess infront of us and we'll get there.

A lovely belief to hold!

JARON LANIER , a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality,and founder and former CEO of VPL. He is currently the lead scientist for theNational Tele-Immersion Initiative

From: David Farber Date: June 14, 2000

Gelernter's manifesto is certainly well written. It is flowery and eloquently stated.However, why is there always a "however", it introduces new terms but not thatmany new ideas that have not been often expressed.

We are at the edge of a real dramatic change in technology. For the past decade wehave evolved from a view that the network is just a way of connecting computerstogether to the current view that the network is the action to the view often stated(by me and others) that no one cares about the network but only what they canaccess and interact with ¦ information and people.

We are about to replace our old slow electro-optical communications systems withall optical end to end systems. This technology offers an enormous increase in bitsper second. One stand of fiber can carry more bits per second than the entirecurrent national backbone. This will cause a dramatic change in every thing we havenow. We will have to re-think our network protocols, the architecture of ourcomputers and just what we mean by a computer and software. Old ideas will soongo the way of the big mainframe operating systems and computers.

Back to the manifesto. It blends well into this rethinking process that the newtechnology will force. It would be unfortunate if the result of this reconceptualization ended up with the same old appearance and world model to users.The manifesto is a major step in making sure that does not happen. Let's justrealize that the ideas are not new - they reflect the ideas of many people over manyyears. Now we need an industrial structure that allows these ideas to be developedand marketed!

DAVID FARBER, considered by many to be the grandfather of the Internet, is ChiefTechnologist, Federal Communications Commission.

From: Danny HillisDate: June 16, 2000

David Gelernter is basically right: current generation computer interfaces are notvery good. (Since we are all among friends here, we can say it: they suck). The

ubiquitous windows desktop is a classical example of "early lock in", like the Qwertykeyboard and strange conventions for English spelling. These are both generallyacknowledged as unfortunate accidents of history. They are non-optimal, but notquite bad enough to be worth changing. In fact, the standard computer interface inincorporates both of these awful interfaces, yet interestingly, Gelernter does notsuggest changing them.

Are we at the point where the desk top computer interface will be thrown out andreplaced with something better? Is the computer desktop like the Roman alphabet,which we have learned to live with in spite of its quirks, or is like the Roman systemof numerals, which we have pretty much abandoned? As much as I like the idea likethe idea of starting with a clean slate, I think it is more like the alphabet than thenumerals, and it is more likely that the desk top interface will be improved thanabandoned. Most of the specific improvements that Geletner suggests, like contentaddressing, time-linking and multiple names, can be and are being incorporated intostandard interfaces. It won't be elegant, but it will work.

So does this mean that we are doomed to a millennium of Windows 2xxx? I doubt it.As Scott McNealy is fond of pointing out, current PC operating systems are unwieldy"hair balls" of accumulated history. Eventually, someone will start from scratch andbuild something better. But I would be surprised if they start by throwing out thepart that most users are the most comfortable with, which is the metaphor physicaldocument handing. The replacement, when it emerges, will win by doing a betterjob of the same thing.

Yet, there is also a second type of competition, which is not so much a replacementas an addition. Computers are useful for more than handling documents, and otherinterfaces will be developed for these other functions. These are interfaces morelikely to nurture the emergence of radical new ideas. If David Geletner really wantsto invent a new interface(and he would probably be good at it) he should forgetabout looking for a better way to handle documents, and start think about acomputer that handles ideas.

W. DANIEL HILLIS, former vice president of research and development at The WaltDisney Company, is the co-founder of a startup, Applied Minds. He is the author ofbook, The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.

From: Vinod KhoslaDate: June 18, 2000

A brief scan leads to the impression that while "the second coming" is inevitable,like most technologies, the path to getting there often changes the end we get to.Transition strategies here will significantly impact the end state.

VINOD KHOSLA is a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield &Byers. He was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officerof Sun Microsystems.

From: John McCarthyDate: June 18, 2000

Comments on the Gelernter Manifesto

i. I found a lot wrong with the manifesto, so I'll begin with something I found usablein it. Gelernter grumbles in item 31 that since email messages aren't files they don'thave names and can't stand on their own. I also find it a problem, and it occurred tome how to mitigate the problem in my own mail reader which is within my wordprocessor.

Suppose I'm reading a message that I consider significant. Typing a single commandinserts a reference to the appropriate page in the message file at the end of aspecial file of messages, puts in the time, and puts me where I can add anidentifying comment. The entry for the email with the manifesto is "Sat Jun 1712:48:28 2000 /u/jmc/RMAIL.S00==1906 Gelernter Manifesto", giving the time, thelocation of the message in the mail file and the name I gave the message.

If I later click on that line, I'll be reading the message again.

The purpose of messages having names of some sort is so that the receiver canretrieve a message later. I doubt that such a name can be automatically generatedfrom the message itself, because the subject line, etc. are in the mental space of thesender, not the receiver. The receiver has to somehow give the message a name ifhe wants to be able to subsequently retrieve it in one step. In this case, I chose"Gelernter Manifesto".

It took 12 minutes to write and debug the message naming facility in the Xemacseditor. The MS-Word users I consulted told me that it would be very difficult to scriptMS-word and Windows email systems to do it.

ii. We all find ourselves repeating essentially the same tasks in using computers.Here's a slogan.

Anything a user can do himself, he should be able to make the computer do for him.

Fully realizing this slogan would be a big step, but even a little helps. It's calledletting the user "customize" his environment. Point i above is a small example.

Unfortunately, the making of computer systems and software is dominated by theideology of the omnipotent programmer (or web site designer) who knows how theuser (regarded as a child) should think and reduces the user's control to pointingand clicking. This ideology has left even the most sophisticated users in a helplessposition compared to where they were 40 years ago in the late 1950s.

Scripting languages were a start in the direction of giving the user more power, butthe present ones aren't much good, and not even programmers use them much tomake their own lives simpler. Scripting is particularly awkward for point and clickuse. Xemacs customization is reasonably convenient, but it isn't contiguous withXemacs Lisp, a really good programming language.

Linux is a step in the right direction of giving the user control in that the source ofthe operating system is available to users, but I doubt that many users, changeLinux for purely personal convenience.

Back to Gelernter

iii. Most of the Manifesto's metaphors, e.g. "beer from burst barrels" and "scoopedout hole in the beach", aren't informative.

iv. In item 4, Gelernter offers

The Orwell law of the future: any new technology that CAN be tried WILL be. LikeAdam Smith's invisible hand (leading capitalist economies toward ever increasingwealth), Orwell's Law is an empirical fact of life.

It isn't true, and I don't believe Orwell said it. In the preface to "1984", Orwell wrotethat "1984" is a cautionary tale that he didn't expect to happen. In particular,"1984" has the tv that permitted Big Brother's minions to spy on the viewer. I don'tthink Orwell expect that to be tried, and it hasn't been.

Indeed the reverse is true. Most possible new technologies are never tried.

v. Gelernter, like many other commentators, is glib about the system software andits documentation being bad. Don Norman beat that drum, and Apple hired him tomake things better. He and they didn't have much success. A more careful analysisof what causes difficulty and how to fix it is needed.

vi. The problem with file systems and any other tree structures is that treestructures aren't memorable. Someone else's tree structure, e.g. a telephonekeypad tree, is often helpful the first time you use it, but it is a pain to go throughthe tree again and again to reach a particular leaf.

vii. I couldn't figure out what Cybersphere was supposed to mean except that it'sgrand, and I see that the other commentators didn't either. Computers haven'tchanged people's lives to the extent that telephones, radio, automobiles and airtravel did early in the previous century. Paul Krugman is eloquent on this point inthe NY Times for 2000 June 18. Human level artificial intelligence wouldrevolutionize human life, but fewer people in AI are working in that direction than inthe 1970s. Erik Mueller documents one aspect of this neglect in his 1999 articlehttp://www.media.mit.edu/~mueller/papers/storyund.html.

viii. I think the idea of doing an Amazon search for a book on your own computer isa bad one, because the computations are trivial, whereas the file accesses to theAmazon database are substantial. To do it on your own computer would requiredownloading the whole Amazon catalog before you started your search.

ix. Re item 21 thru 26, I don't think changing "desktop" to "information landscape"would have made much difference. The problem of what you can do with a smallscreen will remain as long as we have small screens. Two foot by 3 foot flat screenswith 200 bit per inch resolution will change computer use much more than anotherfactor of 100 in processor speed. We also need the bathtub screen, the beach screenand the bed screen.

x. item 32. Directories reaching out for files is vague and suggests more AI than iscurrently available.

xi. There's something in "streams of time", but it's vague. One thing that is feasibleis for an operating system to make a journal including all the user's key strokes andmouse clicks and identifiable more substantial operations. The journal should beavailable for the user to inspect, replay bits of, and to offer for expert inspectionwhen something has gone wrong.

xii. I don't understand to the objection to names; they were invented long beforecomputers. In item 37, Natasha and Fifth Avenue are names.

xiii. item 41. "To send email, you put a document on someone else's stream." Thatsuggests that the recipient would read it right away or at least at a time determinedby the sender. Present email sits till you get around to it, and that's better.

xiv. Paper will be needed until screens are better. I use paper just as Gelerntersuggests. Print the document for reading and then throw it away. I'll do that even atthe cost of losing the pretty red ink I've put on my printout of the Manifesto.

JOHN McCARTHY is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. A pioneerin artificial intelligence, McCarthy invented LISP, the preeminent AI programminglanguage, and frst proposed general-purpose time sharing of computers.

Responses to V.S. Ramachandran's "Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as thedriving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution" Marc Hauser,Milford Wolpoff, V.S. Ramachandran, and Nicholas Humphrey

From: Marc D. HauserDate: May 31, 2000

I would like to respond to a few of the issues raised by Rama's essay on mirrorneurons. I don't disagree at all about the importance of mirror neurons, but I dodisagree with some of the points that Rama makes about evolution, primates,language, and the interface between brain and behavior. I pick on these points asthey appear.

Point-1: "1) The hominid brain reached almost its presentintellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago."

MDH: What is the basis for this date? What is meant by "intellectual capacity"? Thissounds like the tired old argument from anthropology and other disciplines that theemergence of sophisticated tools, controlled fire, and so on represents the kind offossilized evidence of intelligence that is most meaningful. I think a more carefullyreasoned argument than this is necessary.

Point-2: "3) Why the sudden explosion (often called the "great leap") intechnological sophistication, widespread cave art, clothes, stereotyped dwellings,etc. around 40 thousand years ago, even though the brain had achieved its present"modern" size almost a million years earlier?"

MDH: Why fall in to the pitfall of equating intellectual capacity, creativity and so onwith brain size? I think much of the field has gone beyond this, and certainly, Ramashould be familiar with Deacon's excellent points on the difficulty of disentanglingselection on brain size as opposed to body size. See the "Chihuahua fallacy."

Point-3: "4) Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested byChomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was alreadyin place?"

MDH: Why is the distinction between language arising out of nothing, and evolvingfrom gestural systems? Why not explore the vocal communication of other animals,as many of us have done. Thus, given that no human culture has ever evolved anon-vocal language as its primary means of communication, it seems odd to thinkthat our language evolved from a gestural system. Moreover, the best evidence todate on language-like forms of communication in animals come from theirvocalizations, not their gestural systems. See my two books The Evolution ofCommunication and Wild Minds.

Point-4: "5) Humans are often called the "Machiavellian Primate" referring to ourability to "read minds" in order to predict other peoples' behavior and outsmartthem. Why are apes and humans so good at reading other individuals' intentions?"

MDH: What? Apes reading others' intentions? Not so at all. In fact, there is almostno evidence that apes can read the intentions of others, except for a very recentpaper by Hare, Tomasello and Call (2000, "Animal Behaviour"). All of the studies todate suggest that apes lack a theory of mind. See Tomasello and Call's PrimateCognition and my Wild Minds.

Point-5: "Do higher primates have a specialized brain center or module forgenerating a 'theory of other minds' as proposed by Nick Humphrey and SimonBaron-Cohen?"

MDH: Humphrey and Baron-Cohen are not responsible for the notion of theory ofmind. This goes back to David Premack and Dan Dennett.

Point-6: "The problem is that the human vocal apparatus is vastly moresophisticated than that of any ape but without the correspondingly sophisticatedlanguage areas in the brain the vocal equipment alone would be useless. So how did

these two mechanisms with so many sophisticated interlocking parts evolve intandem? Following Darwin's lead I suggest that our vocal equipment and ourremarkable ability to modulate voice evolved mainly for producing emotional callsand musical sounds during courtship ("croonin a toon"). Once that evolved then thebrain - especially the left hemisphere - could evolve language."

MDH: Several problems here. First, the importance of the vocal apparatus andunderlying neural structure is not a new one, and is best attributed to PhilLieberman. Second, because language is not really about the sound structure per se- sign language is an equally good natural language unless communication in densevegetation is of the essence - a focus on sound and vocal mechanisms per se isprobably misguided. Third, although the human vocal tract is different from thevocal tract of other animals, more "sophisticated" is the wrong classificatory system.The vocal maneuvers of a bird or a bat are extremely complicated, and we can'tcome close to imitating their sounds. Moreover, many of the early claims concerningthe lack of articulatory abilities in primates are simply wrong, even thoughnonhuman primates can't produce many of the sounds of human speech. Finally, theargument that language somehow emerged from emotional calls seems really quiteimpossible since the structure and function of these calls have so few of the crucialproperties of natural language: no reference, no syntax, no decomposable discreteelements that can be recombined.

Point-6: "Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of othersthereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance thatcharacterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely genebased evolution. Moreover, as Rizzolati has noted, these neurons may also enableyou to mime - and possibly understand - the lip and tongue movements of otherswhich, in turn, could provide the opportunity for language to evolve. (This is why,when you stick your tongue out at a new born baby it will reciprocate! How ironicand poignant that this little gesture encapsulates a half a million years of primatebrain evolution.) Once you have these two abilities in place the ability to readsomeone's intentions and the ability to mime their vocalizations then you have set inmotion the evolution of language. You need no longer speak of a unique languageorgan and the problem doesn't seem quite so mysterious any more."

MDH: This is all fine and good, but there is a puzzle that Rama fails to address:Although mirror neurons were first discovered in macaques, and have beenimplicated as crucial in imitation and theory of mind, there is not a shred ofevidence for imitation or theory of mind in macaques. Thus, from a functionalperspective, what is this circuitry doing for a macaque? It is certainly not whatRama has suggested for humans.

Point-7: "These arguments do not in any way negate the idea that there arespecialized brain areas for language in humans. We are dealing, here, with thequestion of how such areas may have evolved, not whether they exist or not."

MDH: Because of the comment in point 6, the evolutionary problem is even morechallenging. How do you go from a set of circuits in macaques that may guide motoractions, and perceptions of them, to implementing such circuits in the service ofmuch more complicated cognitive acrobatics: imitation and mind reading? Moreover,if you are going to make the evolutionary point, it is important to articulate theselective forces that may have led to such cognitive changes.

Point-8: "I suggest that the so-called big bang occurred because certain criticalenvironmental triggers acted on a brain that had already become big for some otherreason and was therefore "pre-adapted" for those cultural innovations that make usuniquely human. (One of the key pre adaptations being mirror neurons.) Inventionslike tool use, art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented"accidentally" in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain'samazing capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neurons.Perhaps ANY major "innovation" happens because of a fortuitous coincidence of

environmental circumstances - usually at a single place and time. But given ourspecies' remarkable propensity for miming, such an invention would tend to spreadvery quickly through the population - once it emerged."

MDH: This idea is unfortunately not new at all. Many people have argued for theimportance of imitation in human evolution, arguing that it has had cataclysmiceffects in all sorts of domains. Both Merlin Donald and Michael Tomasello make thispoint quite eloquently, although they do not make any appeals to mirror neurons.

Point-9: "Thus I regard Rizzolati's discovery - and my purely speculative conjectureson their key role in our evolution - as the most important unreported story of thelast decade."

MDH: I have no problem with the point that mirror neurons represent a key finding.As noted above, I do have several problems with Rama's claims, both in terms oftheir factual correctness, and their originality.

MARC D. HAUSER is an evolutionary psychologist, and a professor at HarvardUniversity where he is a fellow of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is aprofessor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychology, as well as theProgram in Neurosciences. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, andWild Minds: What Animals Think.

From: Milford H. WolpoffDate: June 1, 2000

MHW: I wouldn't know where to start with this, but please consider the following:

Marc Hauser's Point-1: 1) "The hominid brain reached almost its present size - andperhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . " What isthe basis for this date? What is meant by ":intellectual capacity"? This sounds likethe tired old argument from anthropology and other disciplines that the emergenceof sophisticated tools, controlled fire, and so on represents the kind of fossilizedevidence of intelligence that is most meaningful. I think a more carefully reasonedargument than this is necessary."

MHW: The evidence for this is quite good. Brain size has ben within the modernrange, that is 2 sigma around the mean, for at least the last half million years,meaning that the differences are less than populational differences today, whichcannot be meaningfully interpreted behaviorally. The widespread prepared coretechnique suggests complex rule systems by the 250,000 date, and the broadhuman adaptive pattern and markedly expanded range of archaeological sites,including glaciated areas, suggests the same. Burials are soon thereafter, and it isnot a " tired old argument from anthropology" that supports this, but facts. What istired and old is dismissing the abundant evidence for human prehistory andevolution for a snazzier theory based on "a more carefully reasoned argument".Fossils and archaeological remains are the direct evidence we have, and here we areluck because other species do not fossilize any remnants of their behavior.

Marc Hauser's Point-2: 3) "Why the sudden explosion (often called the "great leap" )in technological sophistication, widespread cave art, clothes, stereotyped dwellings,etc. around 40 thousand years ago, even though the brain had achieved its present"modern" size almost a million years earlier?"

MHW: I'd suggest a title for this - the myths of human evolution - if it hadn't beenused already. Parietal art in Europe is not this old, rock art is much older in Australiaand Southern Africa. What about the "sudden explosion" of water craft in SE Asia700,000 years ago when Flores was colonized, the sculpting in the Levant at250,000, etc. This "explosion" is a Eurocentric interpretation of a much morecomplex and interesting history of human artistic and technological endeavors.

Why fall in to the pitfall of equating intellectual capacity, creativity and so on withbrain size?"

MHW: Because we have very large brains and other primate species have muchsmaller ones? Because the brain is the seat of the intellectual capacity andcreativity? Because no other credible explanation has been advanced for over 100years?

I think much of the field has gone beyondthis, and certainly, Rama should befamiliar with Deacon's excellent points on the difficulty of disentangling selection onbrain size as opposed to body size. See the "Chihuahua fallacy".

MHW: Perhaps so, but the field has evidently not gone beyond missing the forest forthe trees.

Hauser Point-3: 4)"Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested byChomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was alreadyin place?"

MHW: yes

Hauser Point: "Why is the distinction between language arising out of nothing, andevolving from gestural systems? Why not explore the vocal communication of otheranimals, as many of us have done. "

MHW: is there yet a credible link between these and human language? Muchevidence indicates that if human language has any links to primate communicationsystems, they are to gestural and ant vocal communications. But this, of course,comes from comparing living species to each other and not to ancestors.

Hauser Point: "Thus, given that no human culture has ever evolved a non vocallanguage as its primary means of communication, it seems odd to think that ourlanguage evolved from a gestural system. "

MHW: This makes no sense. "Evolved," of course, means changed, so how can anevolutionary argument be held to the criterion of not changing?--

Moreover, the best evidence to date on language-like forms of communication inanimals come from their vocalizations, not their gestural systems. See my twobooks "The Evolution of Communication " and "Wild Minds".

MHW: Sure, but we did not evolve from "animals", but most directly from a commonancestor with chimpanzees, which gives us a clue about where to look.

Hauser Point-4: 5) Humans are often called the "Machiavellian Primate" referring toour ability to "read minds" in order to predict other peoples' behavior and outsmartthem. Why are apes and humans so good at reading other individuals' intentions?

MHW: What? Apes reading others' intentions? Not so at all. In fact, there is almostno evidence that apes can read the intentions of others, except for a very recentpaper by Hare, Tomasello and Call (2000, "Animal Behaviour"). All of the studies todate suggest that apes lack a theory of mind. See Tomasello and Call's PrimateCognition and my Wild Minds.

Hauser Point-5: Do higher primates have a specialized brain center or module forgenerating a "theory of other minds" as proposed by Nick Humphrey and SimonBaron-Cohen?

MHW: Humphrey and Baron-Cohen are not responsible for the notion of theory ofmind. This goes back to David Premack and Dan Dennett.

Hauser Point-6: "The problem is that the human vocal apparatus is vastly moresophisticated than that of any ape but without the correspondingly sophisticatedlanguage areas in the brain the vocal equipment alone would be useless. So how didthese two mechanisms with so many sophisticated interlocking parts evolve intandem? Following Darwin's lead I suggest that our vocal equipment and ourremarkable ability to modulate voice evolved mainly for producing emotional callsand musical sounds during courtship ("croonin a toon."). Once that evolved then thebrain - especially the left hemisphere - could evolve language."

MHW: and to think that when Frank Livingstone published a paper in 1962 entitled"could australopithecines sing", it was met with peals of laughter.

MILFORD H. WOLPOFF is Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate ResearchScientist, Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His work andtheories on a "multiregional" model of human development challenge the popular"Eve" theory.He is the author (with Rachel Caspari) of Race and Human Evolution: AFatal Attraction

From: V.S. RamachandranDate: June 1, 2000

RESPONSE TO MARC HAUSER'S COMMENTS

Milford Wolpoff has done an adequate job in refuting the various purported "criticisms" of my essay raised by Marc Hauser . But here are my own reactions toHauser. For what it is worth.

First, Hauser seems not to understand the purpose of the Edge website. He says theideas in the essay (or at least some of them) are not " original" but I wasn't eventrying to be original. The purpose of this website is to provide a platform forexchange of ideas and my goal was to be provocative - not original. Judging fromthe arguments I have already generated between Wolpoff and Hauser, I appear tohave succeeded in doing this. (Needless to say I agree with Wolpoff! ) Secondly,John Brockman's invitation to me was to report on "The most important unreportedstory" - not on my story, but on any story The choice of someone else's work -Rizzolati's - was quite deliberate, because its significance is not widely appreciated,except by experts in the field. (And not even by all "experts.")

But having said that let me add that, despite Hauser's comment, there are manypoints in my essay that are original, e.g. our work on anosognosia patients denyingthe paralysis of other patients or on MU wave suppression that occurs while youwatch another persons movements. Also the point I make about the analogybetween the "second big bang" in human culture (following the industrial/scientificrevolution) and the so-called "big bang" of 40,000 years ago has, to my knowledge,not been made before. The argument is: we know that there could have been nogenetic change in the brain corresponding to the second big bang, so why do somany paleoanthropologists feel the compelling need to invoke one for the first?

I turn now to some of the other issues. Hauser's remarks suggest that he hasn'tread my article carefully. (Since he appears not to understand the ideas or, in somecases, simply repeats what I say but pretends to disagree.)

1) Brain size. I certainly don't think there is a direct and simple correlation betweenbrain size and intelligence. I was setting up this argument merely as a "straw man,"as a rhetorical device, and if Hauser had read on further he would have realized this.Indeed my essay concludes by saying that it isn't size but circuitry that is critical,specifically the circuitry in the ventral premotor area where the mirror neurons are.Thus Hauser is actually agreeing with me although he pretends not to.

Secondly Hauser says ( under his point no. 1 ) "What is meant by intellectual

capacity ? This sounds like the tired old argument from anthropology and otherdisciplines that the emergence of sophisticated tools, controlled fire, and so onrepresents a kind of fossilized evidence of intelligence" If sophisticated tools, fire,shelters, woven clothing etc are not evidence of intelligence, then what IS? PerhapsHauser would prefer that we went back in a time machine to visit early hominids toadminister " I Q tests" of the kind popularized by his former colleague - the late DickHerrenstein? Here I am in complete agreement with Wolpoff that cognitivepsychologists should start paying attention to the evidence from paleoanthropology.

2) Hauser asks: Monkeys have mirror neurons so why don't they have an elaborateculture like us? Again if he had bothered to read the essay he will seen that I raisethe very same question twice in my article. Hauser's confusion stems from a failureto distinguish necessary and sufficient conditions. I argue in my essay that themirror neuron system - and its subsequent elaboration in hominids- may have beennecessary but not sufficient . But it may have been a decisive step. Hauser appearsnot to understand this idea. .

3) Theory of other minds.. Hauser categorically states that apes " do not have atheory of other minds". He should read the elegant work of Povinelli. I would agreewith Hauser, though, that it would be nice to see clearer proof of the kind I amaccustomed to in my own field (visual psychophysics) But as I said above (2) even ifapes did not have a theory of other minds, this wouldn't vitiate my main argument.Perhaps mirror neurons are necessary, but they may not be sufficient for generatinga theory of other minds.

4) Priority: Hauser says that the idea of a specialized mechanism in humans (andperhaps apes) for reading other minds came from David Premack and Dan Dennettnot from Nick Humphrey or Simon Baron - Cohen. Hauser may be right about this- Iam not sure. Dennett is a sophisticated and original thinker and he may very wellhave thought of it .The earliest Humphrey reference I can think of is 1977 at asymposium I organized in Cambridge, UK (published) Can Hauser provide an earlierDennett reference? And I am aware of Premark's ingenious experiments but did heexplicitly state that there may be a specialized mechanism for reading other minds?In any event my essay was an entry for a website chat room - not for a stuffyjournal like psych review. (If it had been the latter I would have been more diligentwith citations and issues of priority) There are dozens of others whom I could havecited. (Including Hauser's own interesting work : perhaps he is peeved that I didn'tcite him) but that would have been beyond the scope of such a short essay.

5) Hauser argues that my my remarks about the important role of culture inevolution are " not new". Again I wasn't pretending it was new .. of course it isntnew, its been made a thousand times.(most recently and eloquently by MerlinDonald) What's new is the link with a specific mechanism - mirror neurons (Or atleast, this point isn't widely appreciated.. and in that sense it satisfies therequirements of John Brockman's original question " what's the single mostunreported story") 6) Hauser says " The evolutionary problem is even morechallenging. How do you go from a set of circuits in macaques that may guide motoractions, and perceptions of them, to implementing such circuits in the service ofmuch more complicated cognitive acrobatics: imitation and mind reading?" Here,atlast, is a good point from Hauser and I would agree with him.. indeed its a pointthat everyone, including Rizzolati - is perfectly aware of. But I would argue thatmirror neurons provide an experimental lever for addressing these issues empiricallyinstead of just speculating about how it might have happened.

7) Hauser argues "Finally, (Ramachandran's) argument that language somehowemerged from emotional calls seems really quite impossible since the structure andfunction of these calls have so few of the crucial properties of natural language: noreference, no syntax, no decomposable discrete elements that can be recombined."Here again Hauser has missed my point. I argued that it was initially the need formodulating the voice for emotional calls (and perhaps singing) that exerted theselection pressure for the development of sophisticated vocal apparatus (and neural

networks). But once these mechanisms for subtle voice modulations were in placethey provided a preadaptation - an opportunity - for language to evolve. Contrary toHauser's remark I certainly wasn't saying that "language evolved from emotionalcalls." That would be ludicrous.

8) Hauser says "The vocal maneuvers of a bird or a bat are extremely complicated,and we can't come close to imitating their sounds". Again Hauser confusesnecessary and sufficient conditions. The emergence of vocal sophistication may havebeen necessary for language evolution (as I point out) but certainly not sufficient(parrots don't have language!)

In summary, I suggest Hauser read my essay again and also read Wolpoff'srefutation of the many points he raises. But I thank him for his response, for itraises many interesting and fascinating issues that need to be widely discussed.

Or perhaps we would all be better off following the advice given by the FrenchAnthropological Society in the 19th century and banning all ideas about theevolution of language! (That's why I tried to emphasize culture in my essay ratherthan language per se.)

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN, M.D., PH.D., is professor and director of the Center for Brainand Cognition, University of California, San Diego, and is adjunct professor at theSalk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California. He is the author (withSandra Blakeslee) of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the HumanMind.

From: Nicholas HumphreyDate: June 1, 2000

A FOOTNOTE TO THE HAUSER-RAMACHANDRAN EXCHANGE

I am not generally one to bother about reputation, but Marc Hauser's gratuitousput-down of my contribution to the theory of mind debate, prompts me to sound anote on my own behalf. Hauser "corrects" Ramachandran for suggesting that I waspartly responsible for the idea that "higher primates have a specialized brain centeror module for generating a 'theory of other minds'". Instead, he says, "this goesback to David Premack and Dan Dennett." However Ramachandran's scholarship onthis score is actually rather better than Hauser's (as it might well be, sinceRamachandran himself was in at the beginning).

There were of course important precursors, but the notion that the capacity totheorize about other minds is an evolved specialism, dependent on a new kind ofcognitive architecture, was in fact first proposed by me in my Lister Lecture to theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science in 1977, and developed at aconference in 1978 organized by Ramachandran himself and Brian Josephson. Theearliest published version appeared as "Nature's Psychologists," (New Scientist, 29June 1978), and a longer version with the same title appeared in Josephson andRamachandran's edited book, Consciousness and the Physical World (Pergamon,1980).

Premack's famous paper "Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind" also appeared in1978. It's true that in my own paper I did not use the phrase "theory of mind".Instead I wrote about how a "natural psychologist" has to develop a "conceptualmodel of how the mind works", based on an intuitive grasp of the "interveningvariables and causal structure." However, the basic idea is just the same. What'smore I went on to propose that in order to develop this kind of intuitive grasp, anewly evolved cognitive skill would be required. "The trick which nature came upwith was introspection: it proved possible for an individual to develop a model of thebehavior of others by reasoning by analogy from his own case, the facts of his owncase being revealed to him by 'examination of the contents of consciousness'."

Dennett's ideas about higher order intentional systems were being developed,independently, around the same time.

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist at the Centre for Philosophy ofNatural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, and the author ofConsciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Leaps of Faith:Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consulation.

From: Marc D. HauserDate: June 5, 2000

Thanks to both Rama and Nick for their replies. In order to quell any further claimsof X not understanding Y, let me simply make a few points. I was not making ablanket claim that Edge should be a forum for only original points. Not at all. Thiswould completely defeat the purpose of such a digital salon. I was making specificcomments about specific points. I was also not saying that Rama hasn't made manyimportant original comments, and findings. His own work is some of the mostprofound around and I cite it all the time (note: I don't care about the lack ofcitation to my own work; that wasn't the point!).

Second, I wasn't saying that fire, tools, etc. are not important in thinking about theevolution of human culture, nor that these are not indices of human intellectualcapacity. Rather, what I was pointing to is the fact that is commonly assumed thatbecause these are such extraordinary achievements, that they must be evidencethat such humans had language. But the connection between language and suchabilities is never explicitly articulated. I don't have an argument to make here, but Iam very much against claims that simply invoke language without saying, first, whatit is about language that makes such cognitive abilities possible, and second,articulating how it happened.

Third, Rama suggests I read Povinelli. Uggh. Rama should read Povinelli and see allthe critiques that have emerged. For example, in Povinelli's original experimentusing the knower-guesser procedure, he claimed that chimps, but not rhesus have atheory of mind because they can recognize ignorance. However, a careful analysis ofhis data (i..e, as opposed to his interpretation) revealed (see C. Heyes, 1998, BBSfor one critique; there were many others) that not only did the chimps takehundreds of trials to discriminate between knower and guesser (i.e., no theory ofmind at all), but in the key transfer test, the chimps failed as well. So, nothing at allin Povinelli provides evidence of theory of mind, and in fact, if Rama had read recentPovinelli, he too would see that Povinelli himself claims that chimps lack this ability;so does Mike Tomasello, another exceptional researcher in this field.

While on the topic, I also did not mean to slight Nick Humphreys. I have long beenan admirer! Given lectures and research that is not published, I think what I wastrying to point out is that David Premack's chimp experiments were conducted wellbefore the BBS publication and Premack made a big deal of this as a specializedmechanism. Of course Premack argued that the chimps did have a theory of mind,but in this particular experiment at least, the same problems arise as those inPovinelli. The chimps don't spontaneously assign the correct mental states tohumans as actors.

Finally, I didn't miss the point at all about emotional calls and language. I got it. AndI don't agree with it. The way in which we modulate our voice for emotional calls isnot sophisticated at all. It doesn't require the rapid bit rate that is critical in speech,a point made by Lieberman many years ago. In any case, I have very much enjoyedthis. This is, after all, what a salon is all about!

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