From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. The philosopher, Thomas Nagel, put it like this, 'for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism…' – there is something it is like to be me, to be you, to be a dolphin – but there's probably nothing like what it is to be a chair, table, or iPhone.
Climate change is a J-curve, not linear. Rates of change globally are occurring at a faster pace than the global population expects, and will impact food production.
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.
Knowledge isn't always used to make people better off, of course. It can be used to make more lethal weaponry and more effective militia and armies – so we must couple knowledge with humanism, with universal sympathy, for it to be a force for good. Without knowledge, however, all the sympathy in the world would be impotent – they must exist together.
Despite our huge scientific advances, we're still very-much at the early stages of discovery. Many of our great questions are also stepping into the realms of philosophy. Do we all see the same way? Do we all perceive the same way? It's a hidden frontier.
Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations- changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing.
I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right. Perhaps I should be even more excited about being wrong, because if I am always proving myself right, I'm just affirming my beliefs and not evolving them… and that's not learning at all, is it?
Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities so that we can exhaustively describe it in purely quantitative mathematics. This was the start of mathematical physics and it depended on this separation of reality into two domains, – the quantitative physical world, the physical world of the purely mathematical properties and the qualitative domain of consciousness.
The discovery of an effective HIV vaccine is the nirvana for all our efforts to prevent AIDS.
DMT forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what's real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You're faced with a world that isn't just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination. It's a place that shouldn't exist within our consensus reality, yet there it is—undeniable.
The strangeness of reality was apparent long before the advent of quantum mechanics. The history of science is a sequence of revelations, each showing that the true nature of things is not what it seems to the casual observer. Quantum mechanics, however, takes this weirdness to a new level.
Emotions are like the reward (or punishment) the brain gives us for getting what we need, want, or could be harmed by.