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Smarting Up Television?
By Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Ph.D.
Pasadena, California
Commercial television has been criticized
for "dumbing down" popular culture. Yet when advertising
dollars are collected per thousand viewers and ratings determine station
valuations and executive careers, it's hardly surprising that appeal
is to the broadest audiences and common denominators are the lowest. For
over a decade I've wondered what would happen if we could bring
together the world's most important thinkers to discuss the world's most
important topics. No fancy graphics, high-tech sets or staged
docudramas. No millionaires, voyeurism or simplistic sensations. It
would be a television series where leading scientists, scholars and
artists debate fundamental ideas that affect the human condition. It
would not be a television series that pandered or pontificated.
I wanted to challenge current belief in
mind and brain, health and sex, creativity and intelligence, technology
and society, and astronomy and cosmology. Would such head-to-head
confrontation give better sense to human meaning and purpose? I wanted
to explore topics from the origin of sex to the end of the universe; I
wanted to assess the nature of consciousness, toughly appraise
parapsychology and ESP, consider the implications of genetic engineering
and artificial intelligence, and see visions of the Years 2025 and 3000.
And I wanted to catch the thinkers behind the thoughts.
I cannot recall how many television
professionals told me that such a show would never get off the ground
much less on the air. This year Closer To Truth--28 shows--is
being broadcast on public television stations across the country. For
viewers, it's an opportunity to witness the debates raging within
lecture halls and research labs around the world, and experience the
most controversial issues of our time with immediacy and candor.
The topic for each episode is set forth
as a question in the program's title. In the premiere episode,
"What are the Grand Questions of Science?", five top
scientists rank today's biggest scientific questions and discuss the
mega-revolutions about to happen. Guests are Hayden Planetarium director
Neil de Grasse Tyson; author and astronomer Timothy Ferris; evolutionary
geneticist Francisco Ayala; neuroscience philosopher Patricia Smith
Churchland; and Caltech provost and theoretical physicist Steve Koonin.
Future episodes include appearances by
Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate in physics; Bruce Murray, planetary
scientist and futurist; John Searle, philosopher; Marvin Minsky,
artificial intelligence pioneer; Francis Fukuyama, political scientist;
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist; Wendy Freedman, Hubble Telescope
researcher; Edward de Bono, creativity educator; W. French Anderson, the
"father of gene therapy"; Sherwin Nuland, surgeon and author
of How We Die; Marilyn Schlitz, anthropologist and
parapsychologist; and many others who contribute new ideas to humanity.
The series is concerned with what it
means to be human in the new millennium--with our continuing search for
collective purpose and individual meaning. It deals with the mysteries
of mind, matter, and meaning. It tests conventional wisdom and seeks
truth wherever it may change, seeing the humor as well as the import of
tradition-breaking ideas. Closer To Truth is not the
Truth, not even Closest to Truth. The discussions reflect
educated opinion but intend no certainty, no smugness--and there's a
welcome measure of ambiguity, complexity, and even confusion.
Challenging current belief is the prism,
the conceptual lens, through which advances in knowledge are viewed. It
doesn't matter whether the challenges are voiced by few or accepted by
many. Challenges are scalpels that dissect ideas, teasing apart and
exposing critical issues. Often current belief is bimodal, with opposing
though widely held views (for example, whether our personal
consciousness can or cannot exist apart from a physical brain).
On each show, we watch five experts
engaging one another in the competitive marketplace of ideas. We enjoy
the spontaneity and the sparks, the tang of the discourse. It's
fascinating how the group dynamics move these intellects to reveal
strong passions and subtle nuances. What emerges is personality; we meet
the people who are challenging truth, changing truth, making truth--and
we watch them navigating with less control than they normally have when
they are lecturing or writing. We have good fun, taking the topics
seriously but (we hope) not ourselves.
Closer To Truth is
not visually manicured, but it does reflect real-time current thinking
of real-world current thinkers. For those who get hooked, there's www.closertotruth.com,
where we expand and extend the ideas of the series. Closer To Truth
is television smarting up.
*********************
Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn is creator and
host of the Closer To Truth public television series and author
of the Closer To Truth book (McGraw-Hill). Trained in brain
research (Ph.D. UCLA), he is the president of The Geneva Companies, a
leading merger and acquisition firm.
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