From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There are two key advantages of thinking of guns as a public health issue. First of all, it removes some of the emotion from the issue. Secondly it moves the debate to be about evidence; where we can empirically show what works, at what cost.
Birds are not born with an innate genetically determined knowledge of constellations. What they do has been brilliantly shown in an experiment by Stephen Emlen.
The problem is that you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!
Engineering life is often less demanding than creating a nuclear weapon, making monitoring more challenging. This complexity underscores the need for the scientific community to actively engage in establishing robust safeguards and developing strategies to prevent bioterrorism.
But when it comes to claims like 'pets alleviate depression,' there's really no solid evidence. In fact, the findings so far are pretty ambiguous. And in one study that found no significant overall effect, cat owners were actually more depressed than the control group.
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.
Gender identity drives self-socialization. People think adults socialise their children, but children socialise themselves. We see the same process in the Great Apes. Self-socialisation we see, is not limited just to humans! That's why I talk about the idea of gender in apes, not just sex.
Because these systems don't see the world the way we do, they can extrapolate things in novel and unexpected ways that we haven't identified. Systems like Deep Mind's AlphaGo are not beating humans at games through speed and brute force, they're discovering new ways to play which we never conceived.
It's amazing how little data the world has about women and girls. There are even gender gaps in the data we use to measure gender gaps.
We are hard wired through our biology to understand: what there is, what to do about what there is, that there is a difference between knowing what there is and knowing what to do about what there is and what the difference is.
A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain.
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.