A Mind
Orgy is a no-holds-bared meeting of minds that I host periodically at
my home. It was originally inspired by the salons of Nineteenth
century Paris. In that tradition, wealthy patrons of the arts and
sciences would invite leading luminaries from diverse disciplines to
their homes for an evening of conversation and interdisciplinary
cross-fertilization.
Well, I'm not wealthy but all you really need to do this is a living room and a Rolodex. You just get a bunch of interesting and articulate people together in one place and encourage them to set aside day to day issues of work, relationships, family, money, etc., and focus on ideas at the frontiers of human thought. I like to challenge people to come prepared with one totally original thought to share.
Some subjects that have come up at previous Mind Orgies:
I also like to include a few provocative quotations on the invitations. Here are a few that have appeared in the past:
"Koko good. People frown sometimes." -- Koko the 'talking' gorilla, when asked what we should tell extraterrestrials about us
"[Virtual Reality] evokes childhood playfulness, it is kind of like a form of make believe but with the Technology stamp of approval on it, so you can be adult and do it, and feel good about it. ... I imagine sort of bursting reality conversations where people are having collaborative waking dreams and that's sort of the vision that I want to move towards. That's not just a creative goal, it's actually a practical one." -- Jaron Lanier, Founder VPL Research
"Macromyopia is society's tendency to overestimate the short term results of a technology and to underestimate its long term results, because it takes a certain length of time (long enough for a sufficient number of people to die, actually) before a completely new technological paradigm can be assimilated." -- John Barlow, Author and Songwriter
"In the entire universe, we are the only intelligent life-forms thought to have a Miss Universe contest." -- Trudy the bag lady in The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner
"How is physical reality going to respond to another reality taking a little bit of the show away?" -- William Bricken, Human Interface Technology Lab, University of Washington
"The ultimate value generated by computer scientists is the invention of languages for describing processes." -- Gerald Sussman, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, M.I.T.
"In the century ahead, the world will contain more democracies than ever before... Since it is a truism that democratic states do not make war on one another, warfare should become essentially irrelevant." -- TIME Magazine Fall 1992 special issue "Beyond the Year 2000"
"Last spring George Smoot, an American astrophysicist added a little flourish to standard scientific procedure. After announcing some new findings, he consecrated them." -- TIME Magazine December 28, 1992
"When you get to a certain position in life, you don't want to feel stupid anymore ... that's when you're dead." - Sylvain Cappell - Courant Institute
"An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself." - Albert Camus
"Fiction must be plausible; real life has no such constraint." - Stewart Brand
