From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain.
There's a considerable correlation between symbols and meaning—especially given how we train modern computer networks these days with unbelievable amounts of data and trillions of parameters. Each parameter is a number representing a probability, but with so many parameters, the answer you get—if you can't follow the vast number of steps—seems unpredictable, much like flipping a coin and not knowing heads or tails. But if you could view all the information, you could determine with certainty which side lands up—that's classical physics. Only in quantum physics does probability acquire a different meaning.
I think intelligence is best understood as an entity that has the ability to improve a metric through repeated exposure over time. By that definition, machine learning algorithms are learning systems — they get better with more data and more exposures. A dog is a learning system. A cat is a learning system — you teach it a trick, reward it a few times, and it just does it from there on. And humans, of course, are the ultimate example of a learning system.
Quantum computing is thus not just a technological pursuit, but a deeply philosophical one, aiming to probe the very foundations of our world.
There's an interesting over-representation of physicists within the existentialist community. Physicists, especially astronomers and cosmologists have had a glimpse of how vast the universe is, and the potential value of it, versus our planet.
Our capacity to reason is recursive, combinatorial – we can reason about our reason – we can argue, criticise and develop tools that enhance our reason thanks to language and communication. We have the power to build on our reason, to enhance it.
For nutrition, the game-changer according to the Pareto principle is cutting out ultra-processed foods. These are the items produced in factories, laden with chemicals, inflammatory oils, and excessive sugars, all of which severely compromise your immune system.
The quest for happiness is a universal, scientific, fact. We can measure happiness, we can assess it, and we can devise strategies to make ourselves happy and fulfilled human beings.
About 65% of the population mouth breathes at night. If you're breathing through your mouth for eight hours, you increase your susceptibility to respiratory illnesses, sleep apnea, snoring, and allergies. You get less oxygen and overwork your body.
Any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'
If stem cells prove safe for use in the brain, you might use them to repair brain damage, but you might use them to increase or enhance brain function.
If you use a complex system approach which doesn't have a fixed period of time in the model, it enables you to start exploring what types of animals you will see! It's classifying the elephants in the room - it may not tell you which one will come, but it will give you a better idea of what is out there in terms of risk.