From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's a considerable correlation between symbols and meaning—especially given how we train modern computer networks these days with unbelievable amounts of data and trillions of parameters. Each parameter is a number representing a probability, but with so many parameters, the answer you get—if you can't follow the vast number of steps—seems unpredictable, much like flipping a coin and not knowing heads or tails. But if you could view all the information, you could determine with certainty which side lands up—that's classical physics. Only in quantum physics does probability acquire a different meaning.
Our body is a community of cells, in which each cell occupies a place appropriate for its tasks on behalf of the whole. Cancer cells, however, are rogues that trespass aggressively into other tissues. Metastasis is what makes cancer so lethal.
We need to change our hearts and minds, not just our behaviours. Forget even the moral argument, discriminating is such a waste. It is from our diverse cultures and communities that we could find the cure for cancer, where we could find all of the solutions for some of our most pressing problems.
Sometimes people view disability as something permanent when, in fact, our bodies are malleable with technology. One could be disabled for a portion of one's life, and then not be for another; the body is malleable and transformable with technology. Disability is not a fixed condition, it's fluid. This is good news- it means that we can ultimately eliminate disability
The surprising consequence is that amplitudes can interfere with each other. If an event can happen in two different ways, one with a positive amplitude and one with a negative amplitude, the contributions can cancel out, leading to zero probability of the event occurring. Decreasing the number of paths can paradoxically increase the likelihood of an outcome.
Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.
What we perceive to be the absolute truth of the world around us is a complex reconstruction, a virtual reality created by the complex machinations of our minds. We have no idea about the world that we inhabit and what the brain is doing is really creating an entire shortcut that enables us to understand the world without being able to physically really understand the reality in which we inhabit, which is a mind-blowing concept.
Einstein famously said time is what a clock measures, which was a half-joke but also the best answer he could give. A clock measures the 'distance' it travels through spacetime between events. That's fascinating, but it still doesn't tell you what time actually is.
Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood.
If there are no other complex biological systems in a galaxy like the Milky Way, then there's no meaning in that galaxy at all—so the galaxy is meaningless if there are no complex biological systems in it. We bring meaning to it.
The phrase 'I don't know' serves as both an invitation and a challenge, a beckoning call to delve into the unknown and piece together the enigmatic puzzle of knowledge. Science, at its core, thrives not on regurgitating established facts but on the exhilaration of unearthing new discoveries.
If stem cells prove safe for use in the brain, you might use them to repair brain damage, but you might use them to increase or enhance brain function.