The Science Writer, John Horgan on Colligo

Legendary Scientific American writer John Horgan on science and AI today, and more

Very pleased to announce a friend and colleague, John Horgan, who joined me for a Q&A about tech, war, and progress.

John has been a formative influence on my own writing career. When I was an unknown writer, John responded to an email request from me to look at a draft of what became the Myth of Artificial Intelligence. The blurb he provided was pivotal in securing the success of that project.

John is an unselfish and wonderful writer, who actively helps younger writers find their voice, and continues to encourage great science writing. He’s now teaching at the Stevens Institute of Technology. John wrote the bestselling book The End of Science in 1996, one of the truly formative books that led to my own views on science and progress. He’s written for National Geographic, Scientific American, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and IEEE Spectrum. His honors include two Science Journalism Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award. His articles have been included in the 2005, 2006 and 2007 editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Beginning in 2010 he wrote the "Cross-check" blog for ScientificAmerican.com, and now writes at johnhorgan.org.

I’m delighted to present his views here on Colligo. Thanks, John!

The Horgan Q/A for Colligo

1. What prompted you to write about the status of science in the 1990s, rather than reporting on specific events and results? Would you change anything about The End of Science if you were to write it today?

JH: Well, I did report on some specific events and results, like the Nobel symposium on the origin of the universe, where Hawking and other bigshots tried to explain why there's something rather than nothing. But my main goal was to explore science's limits. How far can science go in explaining reality? Will there be more great revolutions and revelations in the future, or is our current scientific description of the world the best we can do? I'm pretty happy with how the book turned out, and how my thesis continues to provoke debate. I wish I'd been able to include a chapter on "The End of Mathematics" based on my infamous Scientific American article "The Death of Proof." I started writing such a chapter but just ran out of gas. I remain fascinated by the limits of mathematics and the question of whether reality is mathematical.

2. Is warfare as insoluble as consciousness? You've written extensively on each, and though vastly different on the face of things, they seem to be perennial unsolved problems for humanity.

JH: Consciousness, and more generally the mind-body problem, I do indeed see as insoluble, in the following sense: we'll never find a single, true, final explanation of what we are. But that's fine, because we can explore different possible "solutions" to the mind-body problem forever. If we give up the idea of final, absolute truth, we gain an exhilarating freedom to explore different notions of what we are, can be and should be. This is the theme of my recent book Mind-Body Problems.

As for war, I wrote my book The End of War, which argues we can and must end war, when Obama was President and optimism came more easily. It’s hard being optimistic today, and few people take my pleas for an end to state-sponsored slaughter seriously. But I still keep pushing my end-of-war meme in the hopes that someone will listen. War still appalls me. And I still have faith that we are smart enough, and decent enough, to end war and even the threat of war once and for all. Our survival depends on it.

3. What, if anything, has surprised you in the world of science in your lifetime? In the 21st century?

JH: I'll just focus on what's happened since The End of Science was first published in 1996. The emergence of the replication crisis surprised me. Science has become more corrupt, more careerist, more blatantly bullshitty than I expected. That's a bummer. The discovery of the acceleration of the universe in the late 1990s was a huge surprise, although it's had disappointingly little theoretical impact.

ChatGPT surprised me. You’ve done a great job pushing back against the hype, Erik, but still, I'm taking AI more seriously than I once did. In The End of Science, I explore the possibility of science being taken over by AI, but only as a kind of science-fiction possibility. Finally, I'm intrigued by advances in quantum computing, which might have enormous practical and theoretical consequences. I report on attempts to interpret quantum mechanics, that is, to say what it means, and to harness entanglement and other effects for computation in my most recent book, My Quantum Experiment, which like Mind-Body Problems is available for free online.

4. Would you add anything to your list of problems that qualify as "ironic science"? Have we learned anything substantive about scientific discovery since The End of Science was published?

JH: I've become more sensitive to the ways that our current knowledge can blind us, that is, prevent us from discovering possible solutions to the mysteries of existence. I sum up this problem with an idea called "conservation of ignorance." This idea started as a joke (which is how many of my best ideas, including the end of science, first occur to me). It was my reductio ad absurdum response to an idea in physics called conservation of information. But the more I thought about conservation of ignorance, the more I started taking it seriously, even though it undercuts my end-of-science schtick. Your readers can check out my arguments for conservation of ignorance on my website, johnhorgan.org, which I launched last year and where I give away all my wacky thoughts for free.

Thanks for asking me these questions, Erik. Rock on.

You rock on, too, John! Thank you!

Erik J. Larson