From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Dreaming introduces noise into our system. There's a compelling hypothesis in machine learning called 'overfitting,' where systems become so tuned to recognizing patterns that they falter when faced with new, unexpected scenarios. Some computer scientists are exploring ways to inject noise into computational models to keep them adaptable.
Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old.
In the 1960s and 70s, a lot of quantum physicists (probably high on LSD) thought that quantum mechanics could explain the nature of consciousness, and phenomena like ESP. To this day, you have the Deepak Chopras of the world who associate quantum mechanics with spiritualism and all manner of pseudo-science from homeopathy to teleportation.
The role of science is to educate us about our reality – and we shouldn't be afraid of it. Once we recognise reality, we can adapt to it. If you don't recognise reality, you act irresponsibly, and your actions won't match the environment.
Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.
It's becoming increasingly clear that we don't yet know how simple an organism can be and still be conscious. There's now quite good evidence that bees not only learn tasks but can watch another bee perform one and then learn it themselves. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, no one would have believed that possible.
It's absolutely true that a lot of the time the market is indistinguishable from a coin toss- and we all know that… However, when the system is under some stress, when the market is undergoing changes, the coin toss model just doesn't work.
You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.
Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this.
Going around the world thousands of times presents you with the depth, fragility, strength and richness of Earth; and gives you a sense of what 4.5 billion years actually means. I travelled with our Earth as it crossed the Solar System and watched as Winter and Summer swapped- it was like watching the world take one of 4.5 billion breaths.
Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.
It is essential that the public knows how deeply science and technology affect their lives. A lot of the decisions that will impact our future are underpinned by science, and whilst sometimes these decisions are made by governments – who are elected and hopefully transparent – many are made by corporations who are not generally accountable to the public.