From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete and our explanations of how the world works have therefore to be considered as provisional. This means we have to accept that sometimes we will turn out afterwards to have been wrong.
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, had we not gone down that strict materialist path all those years ago.
Right now, biological evolution is not the main engine of change in the human condition. Instead, social and technological development, which occur on shorter timescales, are the predominant change-makers. In particular, it seems that we are gaining capabilities to directly modify human nature—through genetic selection, gene therapy, cognitive enhancement drugs, life extension treatments.
There will be no cure for cancer until real doctors with real patients in real hospitals can attempt an innovation. The court is primarily interested in the effort made, in the attempt. That is what truly counts.
When you gaze into your dog's eyes, your oxytocin level—the so-called 'love hormone'—rises, and the same thing happens in your dog. It's a powerful pair bond. More recently, though, researchers have found the same effect with cats.
You probably know your cholesterol level. You know your heart rate, your resting heart rate, the number of steps that you take per day. But most people have absolutely no idea what is happening inside their brains other than through self-reflection. So the ability to quantify that and give people direct access to information about what's happening to their brains could be radically transformational.
While the cautionary tales narrated by these thinkers have merit, one can't help but feel they occasionally veer into hyperbole. They often highlight the idea that AI systems can self-evolve, enhancing their capabilities exponentially in mere seconds. However, this overlooks the fact that genuine intelligence augmentation necessitates the incorporation of vast new data.
I worry that we haven't checked our interstellar mailbox, and so we've missed the letter which contained the recipe for our salvation. Perhaps another civilisation sent us a message with the key to our own survival. Physical objects have a huge advantage over listening for signals – you can encode a lot more into a physical object.
Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.
Art is a universal communicator, it is one of the ways that allows me to engage with audiences that might not otherwise think about what we're doing in space every day that's helping improve life here on Earth. And it's a way to help them consider the view from space and do a little bit of Earthling and Earth appreciation.
Animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference- they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Most of our fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, underpin modern civilization.