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哪些科学理念已到退休年龄？
DENNIS OVERBYE 2014年01月17日
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小中大 当你开始新的一年时，以下是一些你可能考虑要和圣诞节包装纸一起扔掉的概念，它们是“人性”、“因果”、“万物法则”、“自由意志”和“循证医学”。
在新近发布的一个包含166名（人数还在增加中）深度思想家、科学家、作家、大话家——具体属哪一类请自行判断——的文章集锦中，提到了众多类似这样的过时信念、现代思想根基或痴心妄想（还是那句话：请自行判断），它们都是要回答一个问题：哪些科学理念已经到了退休年龄？
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Elwood H. Smith
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整个讨论被贴在了edge.org上。去看看。不管你是谁，你都一定会找到某些让你发狂的答案。
自1998年以来，约翰·布罗克曼(John Brockman)一直在张贴类似的问题。其中包括那些东西是你深信不疑但却无法证明的，互联网正在给一切带来怎样的改变，以及有哪些东西你已经改变了看法。布洛克曼是一名作家经纪人，一个爱挑衅的人，在他的在线沙龙Edge上主持知识分子之间的论战。
“其实每次争的都是同一件事，”布罗克曼在电话里说，他解释说，今年的问题出现在去年夏天的一次社会学会议上，立即引发了一场关于该问题是否适合Edge论坛的辩论。
布罗克曼的投稿者是一帮唯恐天下不乱的家伙，他们能聚到一起，基本是出于对想法的热情以及对精彩论战的热爱，其中的许多人是他的客户。（布罗克曼代理着几名《纽约时报》作者，不过本文作者不是。）
其中的一些人是科普界赫赫有名的人物，比如普林斯顿高等研究院(Institute for Advanced Study)数学家兼未来学家弗里曼·戴森(Freeman Dyson)；哈佛大学(Harvard University)语言学家、畅销书作家斯蒂文·平克(Steven Pinker)；牛津大学(Oxford University)进化生物学家、无神论者、畅销书作家理查德·道金斯(Richard Dawkins)；发明了“心流”概念的心理学家米哈里•奇克森特米哈伊(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)，心流是指一个人完全迷失在自己所做的事务中，奇克森特米哈伊说，科学家们需要放弃一个观念，即他们发现的真理永远是放之四海而皆准的。
“有些真理的确如此，“奇克森特米哈伊说，“可是有一些则取决于众多的先决条件，这些条件如此之多，以至于现实和虚构的界线变得模糊起来。”
这种看法得到了演员和科普人士艾伦·阿尔达(Alan Alda)的呼应，他批判了那种事物非真即假的概念，那是逻辑学和数学里的基本概念。有些时候是要考虑语境的。
拿死亡来说，这似乎是一种定义非常清晰的状态。阿尔达说，“尸体就是一块肉，生命消失了。可是，如果你退一步看，它实际上处在一种过渡状态，它会慢慢变成肥料——以另一种方式存在下去。”
诺贝尔物理学奖得主、麻省理工学院(MIT)的弗兰克·维尔切克(Frank Wilczek)建议放弃精神和物质之间的差异，这是自笛卡尔(Descartes)时代以来的一个基础概念，至少在西方是这样。维尔切克说，目前，我们对物质和原子有了更多的了解，物质“可以以一种错综复杂的动态模式翩翩起舞；它能利用环境资源，能自行组合和释放熵。
我们能教它下棋。
不过，别过于激动了。非营利组织教育引擎(Engines for Education)的电脑科学家、心理学家罗杰·尚克(Roger Schank)说，能下棋的电脑无助于我们理解人类如何下棋、为什么下棋，也不会下棋下得无聊了想起来去玩一种新的游戏。他说，我们应该废除“人工智能”这个术语，他还说：“本来就没必要创造人造人类。真人已经够多的了。”
曾创办《全球目录》(Whole Earth Catalog)等刊物的斯图尔特·布兰德(Stewart Brand)打算谈谈核能，他认为一个无法证实的观念阻挠了核能的发展，即任何程度的核辐射都是不安全的，无论这个程度有多低。结果，人们要额外花无数的钱，围绕着核电厂建立起“毫无意义的安全防护”，之所以说它毫无意义，是因为我们的细胞含有某些机制，能修复被辐射破坏的DNA，还有一条更重要的原因，那就是“我们都会死”。
道金斯教授和西北大学(Northeastern University)心理学家莉莎·费德曼·巴瑞特(Lisa Feldman Barrett)均批判了本质主义的概念，这种概念认为，狗和猫、三角形和树木、空间和时间、情感和思想等事物都有一种使其自成一体的内在本质。道金斯提出，这个概念在数学上是可行的，可是一旦被用到物种上，或是政治上，就成了一场灾难，因为它杜绝了事物出现变化或渐变的可能性。
“即使直接投票结果不相上下，弗罗里达州的25张选举人票最后要么全体倒向共和党，要么全体倒向民主党人，”他抱怨道。（这个数字现在已经是29。）“可是美国的州不应该被视为大体上是红的或者蓝的：它们是红蓝比各异的混合体。”
麻省理工学院(MIT)的宇宙学家马克斯·铁马克(Max Tegmark)提出，即使没有“无限”的概念，我们一样可以过得不错。科技公司应用思维(Applied Minds)的电脑科学家W·丹尼尔·希利斯(W. Daniel Hillis)提出，没有“因果”的概念，我们也能过下去，他说，“因果”只是我们的大脑为了满足说故事的嗜好而弄出的产物。MIT电脑科学家希斯·罗埃德(Seth Lloyd)说，到了放弃宇宙这个概念的时候了。
不错，没有什么是神圣不可侵犯的。我们不妨拿医疗新时代风靡一时的循证医学为例。宏观认知公司(MacroCognition)心理学家加里·克莱因 (Gary Klein)说，由于循证医学的概念会阻挠医生尝试没有被随机控制试验验证过的其他疗法，所以,这个概念可能会阻挠医学的发展。他举了一个例子，许多患者所患的疾病，要多于试验能控制的疾病类型。
小说家伊恩·麦克尤恩(Ian McEwan)对今年的问题本身提出了质疑。他说，什么概念都不用消失；科学需要坚持自己的传统和理念。他说，“亚里士多德对人类的各个知识领域都广有涉猎，不过其大部分见解都是错的。然而，他发明了动物学，单这一件事就是无价的功劳。你会把他推到一边吗？谁知道呢，说不定哪一天你就需要一个老概念。”
整个讨论的篇幅超出了12万字。你可以浏览其任何一部分，为它发狂、迷惑或激动。如果说这场论战有一个全局性的观点，那就是根本没有蠢问题这么一说。
毕竟，科学界的硬通货不是信仰、甚至不是真理，而是怀疑。难以想象类似的尝试会来自天主教枢机团(College of Cardinals)，或是中国共产党的中央政治局。和民主制度下的社会一样，在科学界，人们可以质疑所有一切。当科学家和其他知识分子停止争执之时，我们就会知道，我们有麻烦了。
翻译：张薇
http://cn.nytimes.com/science/20140117/c17overbye/
Over the Side With Old Scientific Tenets
By DENNIS OVERBYE January 17, 2014
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小中大 Here are some concepts you might consider tossing out with the Christmas wrappings as you get started on the new year: human nature, cause and effect, the theory of everything, free will and evidence-based medicine.
Those are only a few of the shibboleths, pillars of modern thought or delusions — take your choice — that appear in a new compendium of essays by 166 (and counting) deep thinkers, scientists, writers, blowhards (again, take your choice) as answers to the question: What scientific idea is ready for retirement?
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Elwood H. Smith
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The discussion is posted at edge.org. Take a look. No matter who you are, you are bound to find something that will drive you crazy.
John Brockman, the literary agent and provocateur who presides over intellectual bar fights at Edge, his online salon, has been posing questions like this one since 1998. The questions have included what you believe but can’t prove, how the Internet is changing everything, and what you’ve changed your mind about.
“It’s really the same thing every time,” Mr. Brockman said over the phone, explaining that this year’s question had arisen at a conference on the social sciences last summer and immediately engendered a debate about whether it was suitable for the Edge forum.
Mr. Brockman’s contributors, many of whom are his clients, are a rambunctious lot who are unified by little more than a passion for ideas and the love of a good fight. (He represents several New York Times writers, although not this one.)
Some are boldface names in the pop-science firmament, like Freeman Dyson, the mathematician and futurist at the Institute for Advanced Study; Steven Pinker, the best-selling linguist from Harvard; Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and best-selling atheist from Oxford University; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who invented the notion of flow, or being completely lost in what you are doing, and who says scientists need to let go of the idea that the truths they find are good for all time and place.
“Some are indeed true,” Dr. Csikszentmihalyi says, “but others depend on so many initial conditions that they straddle the boundary between reality and fiction.”
That thought was echoed by Alan Alda, the actor and science popularizer who criticizes the idea that things are either true or false, a staple of logic and math. Sometimes context matters.
Take death, which seems a pretty definitive state. “The body is just a lump,” Mr. Alda says. “Life is gone. But if you step back a bit, the body is actually in a transitional phase while it slowly turns into compost — capable of living in another way.”
Frank Wilczek of M.I.T., a Nobel Prize winner in physics, would retire the distinction between mind and matter, a bedrock notion, at least in the West, since the time of Descartes. We know a lot more about matter and atoms now, Dr. Wilczek says, and about the brain. Matter, he says, “can dance in intricate, dynamic patterns; it can exploit environmental resources, to self-organize and export entropy.”
We can teach it to play chess.
But don’t get too excited. Roger Schank, a computer scientist and psychologist for the nonprofit group Engines for Education, says that a chess-playing computer won’t tell us anything about how or why humans play chess nor will it get interested in a new game when it gets bored. We should abolish the term “artificial intelligence,” he says, adding: “There really is no need to create artificial humans anyway. We have enough real ones already.”
Stewart Brand, founder of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” among many things, wants to talk about nuclear power, which he argues has been hampered by the unprovable notion that no level of radiation, no matter how low, is safe. As a result, billions of extra dollars have been spent to provide “meaningless levels of safety” around nuclear power plants — meaningless because our cells contain mechanisms for repairing radiation damage to DNA and because, moreover, “we all die.”
Professor Dawkins and Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist from Northeastern University, both attack the concept of essentialism, which holds that things like dogs and cats, triangles and trees, space and time, emotions and thoughts — all have an underlying essence that makes them what they are. This works great in math, Professor Dawkins argues, but is a disaster when applied to species or politics, disallowing the possibility of change or gradation.
“Florida must go either wholly Republican or wholly Democrat — all 25 Electoral College votes — even though the popular vote is a dead heat,” he complains. (The number is now 29.) “But states should not be seen as essentially red or blue: they are mixtures in various proportions.”
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T., claims we could get along just fine without the notion of infinity. The computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis of the technology company Applied Minds claims we can get along without the notion of cause and effect, which he says is just an artifact of our brains’ penchant for storytelling. Seth Lloyd, a computer scientist at M.I.T., says it’s time to lose the notion of a universe.
Yes, nothing is sacred. Take evidence-based medicine, all the rage in the new age of health care. Gary Klein, a psychologist for the company MacroCognition, says the idea can impede medical progress by discouraging doctors from trying alternative treatments that have not been blessed by randomized controlled trials. He points out, for example, that many patients suffer from more conditions than experiments can control for.
Ian McEwan, the novelist, attacks this year’s question itself. Retire nothing, he says; science needs to hang onto its traditions and ideas. “Aristotle ranged over the whole of human knowledge and was wrong about much,” he says. “But his invention of zoology alone was priceless. Would you cast him aside? You never know when you might need an old idea.”
The whole thing runs more than 120,000 words. You can dip into it anywhere and be maddened, confused or stirred. If there is an overall point, it is that there is no such thing as a stupid question.
The true currency of science, after all, is not faith or even truth, but doubt. It’s hard to imagine a similar effort coming out of the College of Cardinals or the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. In science, as in democracy, everything has to be up for grabs. When the scientists and other intellectuals stop squabbling, then we will know we are in trouble.
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