Science

Most people assume a wound heals at its natural pace. But no—it healed according to perceived time. If the clock ran faster, the wound healed faster. If it ran slower, healing slowed.

Harvard psychologist & researcher in mindfulness and the psychology of possibility

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.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there's no way such signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

We are fields endowed with consciousness and free will, existing in a reality deeper than the familiar realm of space, time, and interacting objects—precisely the view scientism asserts: that we are merely bodies, properties of physical matter. But scientism is mistaken. Consciousness exists independently of any physical form; it resides in the underlying field that instantiates the matter and energy we measure in space and time.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

Consciousness lies beyond the framework of quantum mechanics. It must be regarded as a primitive of the universe itself, not merely of brains. If consciousness is a universal primitive, then the entire totality of what exists is conscious and desires self‑knowledge. That offers the best way to understand evolution and why we can know: we are parts of a greater whole, we are fields—not bodies. The body is simply the creation of the field, enabling the field to have experiences in a reality collectively constructed by a multitude of fields.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

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.

Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

As a psychotherapist, you have diagnostic categories for problems. There are specific techniques and therapies to apply. So the book really comes out of that frustration. If you think about science, it progresses from description, to categorisation, then to explanation, prediction, and control — and I wanted to feel like there was some science behind what I was doing.

Arguably, though, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

I used to keep a pair of lizards in an aquarium and fed them live crickets. At the time, I didn't think twice about it—I didn't believe crickets had any inner life at all. But now I wonder if I was actually creating the worst moments of their existence by feeding them to my lizards.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

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.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

When it comes to claims like 'pets alleviate depression,' there's really no solid evidence. In fact, the findings so far are pretty ambiguous. And—I don't really want to tell you this—but in one study that found no significant overall effect, cat owners were actually more depressed than the control group.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

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.'

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

At the level of individuals, teams, or even firms, knowledge grows and then saturates. It has a finite 'carrying capacity.' What is interesting is that while these individual units are finite, society at large looks infinite because of changes in the teams—the incumbents—that perform best.

Director of MIT Media Lab; expert in network science and complexity

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 a completely new frontier inhabited by beings that we treat as potential intelligences with whom we can establish a two-way relationship.

We assumed matter was fundamental when we probably should have prioritised consciousness. If we viewed consciousness as the prima materia of reality itself, I think we'd know a lot more about these intelligences and hidden agents than we do today, had we not gone down that strict materialist path all those years ago.

The world we see is always constructed by our brain. We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of 'best guess.' The brain isn't trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world's structure. It's trying to find a model that works—one that is adaptive and allows you to function.