Last questions

For more than two decades, John Brockman annually posed a question and then invited scientists and others to answer it in short essays. These have resulted in fascinating books, some of which I have reviewed here. In the last book in the series, The Last Unknowns (2019), Brockman invited individuals from a variety of fields to pose the ultimate unanswered question. Thus the book is composed of many questions, suggesting that Brockman could have continued his series for many more years. There are numerous "last unknowns," it turns out. Some questions are posed multiple times, in one form or another, in these pages.

"Is a single world language and culture inevitable?" asks a professor of evolutionary biology. A Harvard professor answers that question with another question: "In which century or millennium can all human be expected to speak the same primary language?"

Immortality is another frequent topic on the minds of intellectuals. One asks if immortality is even desirable. Another wonders if even a thousand years would be too long to live. Yet another worries about the practical implications of humans living significantly longer than they do now.

Many questions center around artificial intelligence. One man asks, "Will AI make the Luddites (mostly) right?" Another puts it differently: "How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of the year 1900?" I would settle for the year 2000. Other experts take a much more positive view of AI. One wonders how AI can help create global institutions that we can trust. I would ask, how can we trust AI?

A common subject of these questions has to do with religion and spirituality. "Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?" asks Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton. (Does she want to put herself out of a job?) Others ask variations of the same question. In other words, why do we still have religion when people should know better by now?

Others seem to be asking about what religions call the spirit, without actually using that word. One person asks, "Does consciousness reside only in our brains?" Another asks, "Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body?" Another, "Is there a subtle form of consciousness that operates independent of brain function?"

Interesting questions. More next time.