The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound Unanswered Questions About the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life

By John Brockman and Daniel Kahneman

Discover the universe's last unknowns—here are the unanswered questions that obsess "the world's finest minds" (The Guardian)

Featuring a foreword by DANIEL KAHNEMAN, Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

This is a little book of profound questions (only questions!)—unknowns that address the secrets of our world, our civilization, the meaning of life. Here are the deepest riddles that have fascinated, obsessed, and haunted the greatest thinkers of our time, including Nobel laureates, cosmologists, philosophers, economists, prize-winning novelists, religious scholars, and more than 250 leading scientists, artists, and theorists. In The Last Unknowns, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, asks "a mind-blowing gathering of innovative thinkers" (Booklist): "What is ‘The Last Question,’ your last question, the question for which you will be remembered?"

Featuring the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel JARED DIAMOND • Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist RICHARD THALER • Harvard psychologist STEVEN PINKER • religion scholar ELAINE PAGELS • author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics CARLO ROVELLI • Booker Prize–winning novelist IAN McEWAN • neuroscientist SAM HARRIS • philosopher DANIEL C. DENNETT • MIT theorist SHERRY TURKLE • decoder of the human genome J. CRAIG VENTER • The Coddling of the American Mind author JONATHAN HAIDT • Nobel Prize-winning physicist FRANK WILCZEK • UC Berkeley psychologist ALISON GOPNICK • philosopher REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN • New York Times columnist CARL ZIMMER • MIT cosmologist MAX TEGMARK • Whole Earth founder STEWART BRAND • "Marginal Revolution" economist TYLER COWEN • Anatomy of Love author HELEN FISHER • Noble Prize-winning NASA physicist JOHN C. MATHER • psychologist JUDITH RICH HARRIS • Princeton physicist FREEMAN DYSON • musician BRIAN ENO • environmental scientist JENNIFER JACQUET • Duke economist DAN ARIELY • Oxford philosopher A. C. GRAYLING • Harvard cosmologist LISA RANDALL • anthropologist MARY CATHERINE BATESON • Emotional Intelligence author DANIEL GOLEMAN • Harvard genticist GEORGE CHURCH • Blueprint author NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS • Stanford political scientist MARGARET LEVI • economist ALAN S. BLINDER • publisher TIM O'REILLY • theoretical cosmologist JANNA LEVIN • Serpentine Gallery owner HANS ULRICH OBRIST • Wired founding editor KEVIN KELLY • Cambridge astrophysicist MARTIN REES, and more than 200 others.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062897954

John Brockman

The publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, John Brockman is the editor of Know This, This Idea Must Die, This Explains Everything, This Will Make You Smarter, and other volumes.

Book preview

Introduction

Interrogate Reality

After twenty years, I’ve run out of questions. So, for the finale to a noteworthy Edge project, can you ask The Last Question?

Did I say twenty years? My strange obsession with the idea of Question goes back to 1968, when I first wrote about the idea of interrogating reality¹:

The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present.² The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it.

Everything has been explained. There is nothing left to consider. The explanation can no longer be treated as a definition. The question: a description. The answer: not explanation, but a description and knowing how to consider it. Asking or telling: there isn’t any difference.

No explanation, no solution, but consideration of the question. Every proposition proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the universe required for the fact.³

Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions.⁴ What is important is not to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such to themselves.⁵

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in huge libraries filled with books, in fantastic amounts of data stored on servers. There’s no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative.

The conceptual artist/philosopher James Lee Byars contacted me and suggested a collaboration of sorts which resulted in our taking daily walks in Central Park as Byars and I walked and talked, conversing only in interrogative sentences. Does it sound like fun? Want to try it?

James Lee soon began to develop his ideas, which led to The World Question Center:

To arrive at an axiology of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

On November 26, 1968, he launched The World Question Center in a one-hour television program produced in Brussels at the studios of the Belgian national television network and broadcast live to a national audience. During the hour, he called numerous celebrated intellectuals such as composer John Cage, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, futurist Herman Kahn, artist Joseph Beuys, novelist Jerzy Kosinski, poet Michael McClure, and asked, in various ways, the following:

I’m trying to find hypotheses that people are working with that are reduced into some type of very simple single question with no explanation, hopefully, that’s important to them in their own evolution of knowledge. Might you offer one that’s personal?

For the 50th anniversary of The World Question Center, and for the finale to the twenty years of Edge Questions, I turned it over to the Edgies:

"Ask ‘The Last Question,’ your last question, the question for which you will be

Reviews for The Last Unknowns

[auntmarge64 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Just the questions. No discussion, no tentative answers. Just a question and then the name and identity of the person asking it. Is this a joke?

[davidwineberg · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

On Twitter, long threads develop over a question asked by one person. The responses come from a large variety of people, usually with no expertise in the subject matter. In The Last Unknowns, John Brockman asked a gaggle of mostly distinguished academics to come up with a question that had no answer. The result is one short question per page, with the questioner’s name and credentials at the top. Often, the credentials are longer than the question. It’s twitter for the accomplished.Some work to game the system, just like on a twitter thread. Their questions are carefully crafted to be impossible or at least impossibly clever:David Chalmers, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, asks: How can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question, including this one? (Ha ha ha) Tyler Cowen, economic guru, asks: How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of 1900? Rolf Dobelli of Zurich Minds asks: Does this question exist in a parallel universe?So academics can be fun people too. Here are some good ones:Alun Anderson: Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?Lisa Feldman Barrett: How does a single brain architecture create many kinds of human minds?Andrew Barron: What would a diagram that gave a complete understanding of imagination need to be?They can also be incomprehensible:Amanda Gefter: Is intersubjectivity possible in a quantum mechanical universe?And there the oldies but goldies, like: Why? and: I=we? For all their erudition, not very original I’m afraid.The majority of the questions are in two areas: the human mind, and the cosmos. There is only one question about surviving climate change, if that says anything about the concerns of the intelligentsia. Besides academics, there are a few artists and entertainers. I’m not sure of what use all this is. It seems to be a collection of questions to end conversations with.David Wineberg