From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We do not operate like cameras, capturing a 1:1 replica of the external world. Our sensory faculties are not conduits of raw data; they are gateways to a world laden with meaning.
I remember one day though, conversing with a primatologist and saying, 'oh, animals are just like us… we're not that special…' and he said, 'well, when did chimps build their own large hadron collider?' – I was gob smacked. That one comment made me realise how absurd it is to claim we aren't that different from other animals because, clearly, we're amazingly different.
All of this was unexpected. The entire development was unexpected. Nobody could really believe that this would happen.
Our research over the past 45+ years shows that when you're actively noticing, your neurons are firing, and that's literally and figuratively enlivening. And what do we do when we're having fun? We notice, we engage. So mindfulness is not just beneficial—it's enjoyable.
If you don't believe in climate change, it is like telling me you don't believe in gravity. I don't care if you don't believe in gravity and I don't care if you don't believe in climate change… both are affecting you, and there's nothing you can do to deny or neutralize either of them.
Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations- changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing.
Biology doesn't need to be obeyed, but it always needs to be considered. If we discuss gender differences, we cannot act as if biology doesn't exist. We live at a time where a group of people – for ideological reasons – have made it clear that they think we can shove biology aside, that everything is culturally constructed, and we can act like biology doesn't exist. That's not going to work, that's not how the world works.
One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?
Quantum mechanics is a whole new way of thinking– it says that the world is all by itself as a wave function of the universe, but you can never observe that. You can never observe a wave function directly. There is a complex relationship between what the world is and what you see when you look at it, and that relationship involves the idea that you can never predict precisely what you will see, but you can simply say the probability of what you will see.
Dogs, chipmunks, squirrels, fish and dolphins do not have a meta-cognitive understanding of themselves. A dog can feel sad (we think) but cannot have a meta-cognitive understanding of the fact they feel sad and what to therefore do about.
We used to think life could only exist in a very constrained rage of parameters; between the boiling and freezing point of water, at neutral pH, without too much pressure, with access to sunlight. What we know now is that life is more robust, and more opportunistic than we could have ever thought.
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.