From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?
Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities so that we can exhaustively describe it in purely quantitative mathematics. This was the start of mathematical physics and it depended on this separation of reality into two domains, – the quantitative physical world, the physical world of the purely mathematical properties and the qualitative domain of consciousness.
It's a roll of the dice whenever one of these novel viruses emerges; sometimes they will be severe and contagious enough to cause a problem, and this one is.
This tool is truly the best thing that the science has come up with for getting two people to like each other. A little bit of optimisation can be effective—you should be eating healthy and exercising and doing the basics. But I tend to think in terms of relational optimisation: how can I put two people in the best position to share things about themselves that allow them to find conversational pathways that happen to go well?
We all share the same 'planet in space'. When you take the time to think about it, that 'we're all in space' part is pretty compelling. I would argue though that small does not mean insignificant. It is a bit of a contradiction – seeing the beauty of Earth from space and the reality of how small our planet is in the grand scheme of the universe, but at the same time recognizing the significance in how perfectly placed in the universe our planet is to take care of us.
It's difficult to describe to people who aren't curious, just what curiosity is. Imagine explaining to a robot or a computer what curiosity is! For those of us who experience it however, it's almost a primal-pull.
I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
Our body operates both quantumly and classically, and the quantum computation within us is far more sophisticated than any quantum computer we could imagine building—so we already possess that capability. Yet consciousness does not reside in our body, however quantum or classical it may be; it resides in the field that we are. This field communicates with the body and, through it, exerts control.
The easiest way to understand noise is by thinking about measurements. The variability of the error is noise – and that's important. In the mathematics of accuracy, the expression for total error is very simple and quite compelling. It is bias-squared plus noise-squared.
We could partly predict where people will come from for future events.
There will be no cure for cancer until real doctors with real patients in real hospitals can attempt an innovation.
When you close your eyes and imagine the person you're going to be in 10 years, this area of your brain is totally deactivated – it's treating the person you are going to become as a stranger. This is why people have such a hard time getting prostate exams, staying on a diet, quitting smoking, because the person who is going to benefit the most from these things is literally not you.