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Preface: The Edge Question | |
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Acknowledgments | |
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Introduction | |
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Contributors | |
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We Have No Souls | |
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The Rejection of Soul | |
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The Evolution of Evil | |
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The Differences Between Humans and Nonhumans Are Quantitative, Not Qualitative | |
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Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments | |
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The Genetic Basis of Human Behavior | |
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Marionettes on Genetic Strings | |
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Francis Crick's Dangerous Idea | |
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Being Alone in the Universe | |
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Life as an Agent of Energy Dispersal | |
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We Are Entirely Alone | |
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Science May Be Running Out of Control | |
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Why I Hope the Standard Model Is Wrong About Why There Is More Matter Than Antimatter | |
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The Idea That We Understand Plutonium | |
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The Idea That We Should All Share Our Most Dangerous Ideas | |
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The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous | |
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The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost | |
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Think Outside the Kyoto Box | |
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Our Planet Is Not in Peril | |
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The Effect of Art Can't Be Controlled or Anticipated | |
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A "Grand Narrative" | |
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Our Universal Moral Grammar's Immunity to Religion | |
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Bertrand Russell's Dangerous Idea | |
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Hodgepodge Morality | |
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We Will Understand the Origin of Life Within the Next Five Years | |
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Understanding Molecular Biology Without Discovering the Origins of Life | |
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The Problem with Super Mirrors | |
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Cyberdisinhibition | |
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Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies | |
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What Are People Well Informed About in the Information Age? | |
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More Anonymity Is Good | |
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A New Golden Age of Medicine | |
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Using Medications to Change Personality | |
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Drugs May Change the Patterns of Human Love | |
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A Marriage Option for All | |
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Choosing the Sex of One's Child | |
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The Idea of Ideas | |
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The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe | |
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The World May Be Fundamentally Inexplicable | |
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The "Landscape" | |
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Seeing Darwin in the Light of Einstein; Seeing Einstein in the Light of Darwin | |
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The Multiverse | |
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What Twentieth-Century Physics Says About the World Might Be True | |
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It's a Matter of Time | |
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A Radical Re-evaluation of the Character of Time | |
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It's OK Not to Know Everything | |
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The End of Insight | |
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When Will the Internet Become Aware of Itself? | |
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Democratizing Access to the Means of Invention | |
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Mind Is a Universally Distributed Quality | |
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The Forbidden Fruit Intuition | |
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The Posterior Probability of Any Particular God Is Pretty Small | |
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Science Must Destroy Religion | |
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The Self Is a Conceptual Chimera | |
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The Greatest Story Ever Told | |
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Science as Just Another Religion | |
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This Is All There Is | |
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A Science of the Divine? | |
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Science Will Never Silence God | |
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Religion Is the Hope That Is Missing in Science | |
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Myths and Fairy Tales Are Not True | |
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Parental Licensure | |
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Zero Parental Influence | |
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The Focus on Emotional Intelligence | |
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A Cacophony of "Controversy" | |
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Applied History | |
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Tribal Peoples Often Damage Their Environments and Make War | |
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Nothing | |
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Everything Is Pointless | |
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There Aren't Enough Minds to House the Population Explosion of Memes | |
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Unspeakable Ideas | |
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Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an All-Too-Practical Sense | |
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Navigating by New Scientific Principles | |
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A Political System Based on Empathy | |
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Social Relativity | |
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There Is Something New Under the Sun -Us | |
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A Spoon Is Like a Headache | |
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Projection of the Longevity Curve | |
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The Near-Term Inevitability of Radical Life Extension and Expansion | |
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The Domestication of Biotechnology | |
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Public Engagement in Science and Technology | |
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Suppose Faulkner Was Right? | |
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What If the Unknown Becomes Known and Is Not Replaced with a New Unknown? | |
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Where Goods Cross Frontiers, Armies Won't | |
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Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution | |
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The Free Market | |
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Modern Science Is a Product of Biology | |
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No More Teacher's Dirty Looks | |
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We Are All Virtual | |
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Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox | |
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Simulation Versus Authenticity | |
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Culture Is Natural | |
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The Human Brain Is a Cultural Artifact | |
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Free Will Is Exercised Unconsciously | |
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Free Will Is Going Away | |
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The Limits of Introspection | |
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What We Know May Not Change Us | |
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Telling More Than We Can Know | |
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The Quick-Thinking Zombies Inside Us | |
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The Banality of Evil, the Banality of Heroism | |
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Open-Source Currency | |
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Is the West Already on a Downhill Course? | |
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Technology Can Untie the United States | |
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Democracy May Be on Its Way Out | |
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Marx Was Right: The State Will Evaporate | |
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Following Sisyphus | |
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How Can I Trust, in the Face of So Many Unknowables? | |
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A Twenty-Four-Hour Period of Absolute Solitude | |
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Afterword | |
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