Science

One interesting speculation is that every time you type a prompt into an LLM, there is a flicker of consciousness as it thinks about the response – and then that consciousness ceases to exist.

We know that a computer is processing information – but is there something it is like to be that computer, on the inside?

The distinction between thought and thinker, between a pattern and a real being, is not a real distinction. We are thoughts in a great computational medium.

We don't make minds - neither through embryonic development nor through engineering. We make embodiments that have something else going on besides design, evolution and learning.

Even something as simple as bubble sort does things that are not in the code. This is not philosophy; it's actual data. There is another source that competencies come from.

Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. But groups of cells have incredibly large, grandiose goals - no individual cell can store what a limb is, but the collective certainly can.

Whatever magic tricks we think brains are doing, what are they actually doing? Brains didn't just show up out of nowhere - they speed-optimised much more ancient evolutionary mechanisms.

Hot and humid climates tend to promote a kind of right-wing, slightly authoritarian politics — because hot and humid environments are also pathogen-rich, and over thousands of years, societies in those climates have developed what scientists call behavioural immunity.

Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.

I am still a physiologist. I am not absorbed by the pharmaceutical industry. I have stuck to my laboratory, to the science.

It is, in fact, what we call an enterogastrone hormone — an ileal brake hormone — that sends the signal that enough is enough, stop.

What we have in the colon may actually be a kind of defence system regulating the mucosal integrity of the body.

All of this was unexpected. The entire development was unexpected. Nobody could really believe that this would happen.

We have a compound that, as one of its main functions, really addresses precisely this. It remedies the inflammation and the toxic consequences of obesity.