From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Cooking is about precision, but it's also about understanding the science behind why ingredients behave the way they do. You can't innovate without understanding the fundamentals.
The scientist mindset says, I will not let my ideas become an ideology. When I start to form an opinion, I should treat it as a hypothesis before doing some observations or experiments to test it. I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right.
The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?
The quantum universe is counter-intuitive, it's fuzzy, probabilistic, and suggests things that we would regard as fantastical and magical if we saw them on the everyday scale- yet it's the most powerful theory in science.
The brain, if nothing else, is a giant pattern detector. It looks for order in chaos. And those patterns matter: they can mean the difference between life and death. Music taps into that same machinery because it's so highly structured. When your brain says, I thought this path would lead here, but it actually took me somewhere new — you experience pleasure.
Our experience is very limited to the surface of this rock we call home. You cannot show-off in space, we must be humble. The only purpose for us to seek journeys into space is to learn about the unknown. That's a spiritual conquest. Leaving the solar system has no commercial benefits.
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.
Our senses allow us to perceive, but they're incredibly limited. Science sees far beyond our human blind spots, and the reaches of this 'bubble' our senses create for us. When you're in a bubble, you inhabit a form of fictional reality, and we've seen the dangerous consequences of this in financial bubbles, stock market bubbles, real estate bubbles… If you're not paying attention reality comes crashing in.
Humans are now more numerous than any large land animal ever to walk the Earth, and the combined weight of our fleshy biomass outstrips that of most other larger animals put together, with the single exception of our own livestock.
We are fields endowed with consciousness and free will, existing in a reality deeper than the familiar realm of space, time, and interacting objects—precisely the view scientism asserts: that we are merely bodies, properties of physical matter. But scientism is mistaken. Consciousness exists independently of any physical form; it resides in the underlying field that instantiates the matter and energy we measure in space and time.
On the whole, science is seen as one of the most trusted professions- and we need to retain that trust. It is essential that the public knows how deeply science and technology affect their lives.
For me, our sophisticated way of communicating- with words- is that crucial difference. It meant that for the first time, we could teach another about something that wasn't present… whereas young chimps just learn by observing. We can read books about the distant past, and plan the distant future.