From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's no way electrical 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.
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.
The story of modernity is a story of scientific advance – but in reality, with every step forward, we're taking half a step backward in terms of making ourselves more fragile.
Technology should be leveraged to enhance the physical and human experience, not replace it.
If you want to see where human nature is most revealed, you have to look at human beings in their most stressful and painful scenarios. It is in those situations that you can learn how people behave and how you can behave.
Happiness is a measure that reflects the success with which people achieve their personal objectives of living levels, happy and healthy families and satisfying work.
To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than we are. This image- of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger- is so haunting because it is at least partly true.
I genuinely believe that if music comes from your heart and soul, that people will hear that and will be able to connect with the truth of it. For a musician, that's really important- you have to be true to yourself and to the feelings you have when you make music.
To have courage, you need fear. Courage is not the opposite of fear, rather it is the triumph over fear. There is nothing courageous about a guaranteed outcome.
I think what's hard for us to appreciate today is that, for thousands of years of human history—let alone pre-history—there was never this sense, so common to us now, of a future likely to be radically different from the present. But that's a very recent development in human thought that really only dates back, as I argue in the book, to the 18th century.
When you're behind a camera, you have this incredible power to freeze a moment in time. But with that power comes responsibility. You're not just taking a picture, you're creating a narrative, you're telling a story.
We are born creative and often seek to transform our surroundings to suit our existence. Everything around us constantly changes and so creative options for adapting to this change become the only guarantee we have for a meaningful existence.