From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Habituation is a very basic mechanism. It's something we find in every neuron and every system of our brain, including our fundamental abilities like perception. Essentially, we stop responding to and perceiving things that are not changing or are changing very gradually.
Why should a creature that evolved out of slime, which has all the limitations which we do, be able to access this fundamental information about the universe which allows us, for example, to be able to predict the magnetic moment of the electron to a trillion decimal places on the basis of purely mathematical calculation. Why does that work? It is a miracle, it is magic, but it works- and that's the part of magic that's real.
Emotions are like the reward (or punishment) the brain gives us for getting what we need, want, or could be harmed by.
In 2010, Alibaba started talking about itself as an ecosystem and it invited many of the world's top biologists to come and lecture on how plants, water and animals all interact – and how that could teach a business about how to interact with its' own marketplace.
putting all our knowledge together, the number of civilizations which could have arisen by now is about one billion.
The discovery of an effective HIV vaccine is the nirvana for all our efforts to prevent AIDS.
One can certainly live their life happily, here on earth never looking up or contemplating what's out there… but for many people (myself included) when you become aware of how much is out there? You feel this compelling pull of curiosity to understand.
We've had wars, poverty, and homelessness long before anyone went into space. It's not accurate to say, 'we're doing space exploration, and that's why we have poverty' – if we stopped space exploration, those problems wouldn't be solved, they haven't been solved in thousands of years.
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.
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.
When you examine how these myriad factors intertwine, from genetics and evolution to the proteins synthesized mere minutes ago, you see a continuous arc. In my view, there's no room in this intricate web for free will.
In comparing alternative explanations, it is not necessarily the one with the most evidence apparently in its favour that we should choose but the one with least evidence against it. One solid piece of evidence can demolish a hypothesis.