From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
He describes mental wellness as an unwavering commitment to reality, regardless of the cost. Trauma, in this light, can be a powerful teacher, though its lessons often require revisiting. These moments offer a stark glimpse of reality, a contrast to the daily bombardment of trivial concerns.
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.
We wouldn't like there to be any heroin in society, but there's plenty of heroin. So our discussion can't just concern our moral feelings about drug addiction. It has to involve our consequential feelings about prisons, overdose deaths, and the effect on communities. You can't escape consequences when you talk about the world.
Most astronomers are surprised, but biologists look at the history of life on Earth. Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky.
When discussing consciousness with my three sons, I describe it as an emergent phenomenon. Imagine 80,000 people in a stadium, each one representing a neuron. The collective roar you hear when you approach the stadium might be likened to consciousness.
Excellence is almost a tactile feeling – and it starts with a vision… sometimes a vision that shows you a path that's so good that it cannot not succeed.
Life is not a race against other people. Life is a competition with yourself. One of the greatest achievements in life is to outperform yourself and live your greatest life possible. Greatness lives in all of us, but we must all find what it is that ignites our souls.
Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.
The sacrifice is perhaps a decade- and it's a total sacrifice- you may not see your kids, you may miss an entire cycle of your lives, but you're doing it to provide for them in the future in a way you never could if you were an employee.
When you examine how these myriad factors intertwine, from genetics and evolution to the proteins synthesized mere minutes ago, you see a continuous arc. In my view, there's no room in this intricate web for free will.
When you first go to war as a young guy, it's almost like you want to get into combat. Quickly though, you realise that these are real people! You have to bring the human element to the fore. At first it was let's go to war… then it was let's do the right thing… and then it was why are we even doing this?
Why should a creature that evolved out of slime, which has all the limitations which we do, be able to access this fundamental information about the universe which allows us, for example, to be able to predict the magnetic moment of the electron to a trillion decimal places on the basis of purely mathematical calculation. Why does that work? It is a miracle, it is magic, but it works- and that's the part of magic that's real.