From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
The greatest adventure that any of us can take is answering these questions for ourselves. This isn't deep, dark, conversation, it's normal conversation. The wisest, coolest prophets out there… people like the Dalai Lama… they're full of joy.
As I see it, education that strengthens our inclination toward the good is the means toward creating decent behavior in humans. Such education should be of the formal kind and through role modeling and osmosis.
The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.
The idea of time as something distinct from us, which we are then having to fight and struggle with all the time would simply not have existed to the mediaeval English peasant, who would have existed much more in what anthropologists call 'task orientation'.
What failure really means is that you are trying to live life, and the fact that you fail means that you are trying. As soon as you try to avoid failure, you are facing the wrong direction.
Panpsychism does introduce a new Copernican revolution that human consciousness is not something cosmically special, we are not the only physical entity that has an inner qualitative dimension as well as the external quantitative aspects of our nature. Human consciousness for the panpsychist is just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
It's only when we were asked what price we were prepared to pay that we found the truth; we were prepared to pay with our lives.
The strangeness of reality was apparent long before the advent of quantum mechanics. The history of science is a sequence of revelations, each showing that the true nature of things is not what it seems to the casual observer. Quantum mechanics, however, takes this weirdness to a new level.
There are all kinds of things where we can use technology to reflect our own humanity to better us.
One of the greatest myths in the lives of the people I coach is, 'I will be happy when…' as if there is some place to go to. There's only one book that ends with the phrase happily ever after, that's a fairy-tale.
Freedom of expression, the right to explore, the right to have the adventure of intellectual discovery is a deep personal right precisely because it is a deep personal pleasure.