I peruse Edge's website once a month to see what's stimulating there. The Julian Barbour article, a few years back, was pretty stimulating, but unfortunately most of the "original" thinkers on Edge appear to have gone through the similar indoctrinations. Jaron Lanier appears to have good instincts, possibly because he got started without having his mind coerced by the, err, finest institutions of higher learning that the rest of the Edge gang appear to have traveled through--like fresh food travels through me!

Earlier Danny Hillis proposes "ARISTOTLE" a computer based personal tutor as an educational improvement. Should work, not! There's merely the trivial matter of getting a computing device to think first! It's possible that with sufficient computing power, we may get very good simulations someday. Maybe good enough to simulate a tutor, but I don't see it.

The latest Edge essay is from Paul Bloom insisting that dualism is "required", especially by religion. I don't think the Tao or Zen Buddhism requires dualism. And since Vatican II catholic theologians have also been questioning the need for dualism--e.g. this text from Thomas Sheehan at a colloquium at Loyola. File under: stuck inside the Cartesian box with the subject-object dualism blues again.  ¶ 4:40 PM