From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We all have obstacles we think can't be overcome, but if our dream is great enough, and we work hard enough, the world is ours for the taking.
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.
There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.
A particular individual trait that has piqued my interest through research is intellectual humility. Embracing the possibility of being wrong enhances
Looking back, it was one of the best things that could've happened to me.
When I got better, even simple things like being able to wake-up, go for a walk, speak, and observe life, felt viscerally stunning and good. I found a state of being – a state that gave me perspective and feeling about life and my place in it.
a compelling call to action that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.
The paradox is that in the Milky Way galaxy, with something like 400 billion stars and trillions of planets, it's estimated there may be around 10 billion potentially Earth-like worlds. And the galaxy has been around for about 13 billion years. If a civilisation had developed ahead of us and become spacefaring, it's very hard to see why we haven't noticed any evidence of that.
So many people say, 'Jacqueline, I would love to change the world- but I don't know my purpose yet…' Purpose doesn't come to people sitting at the starting blocks and thinking about purpose. You have to live it.
You must tell yourself the truth about money if you're going to give it away well. If you can't live well with $999 million, there's something clearly wrong with you. Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
If the role of government is, as Thomas Hobbes put it, to stop life being nasty brutish and short because humans unregulated are at each other's throats, then government has to step up to that plate now and start rethinking what it can do to ensure cohesion in societies where you will always have disagreement.
I can see from people I've lost in my life that the thing you leave behind is love, so I hope I've created a bit of that too… I know I've been lucky to receive a lot.