From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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 science, one never shows causality. Causality is something philosophers are concerned with, not scientists. I cannot stress this in strong enough words- we have not shown a causal link between the public's mood state as we measured it from twitter data feeds, and the market.
Most people assume a wound heals at its natural pace. But no—it healed according to perceived time. If the clock ran faster, the wound healed faster. If it ran slower, healing slowed.
If only one-quarter melted, it would lead to a 2-metre rise in sea-levels all over the world and would threaten thousands of cities and towns on every continent.
I used to keep a pair of lizards in an aquarium and fed them live crickets. At the time, I didn't think twice about it—I didn't believe crickets had any inner life at all. But now I wonder if I was actually creating the worst moments of their existence by feeding them to my lizards.
Quantum mechanics is a consistent mathematical structure, not that difficult to understand in itself, which nature has chosen. The confusing thing is that nature chose something that doesn't feel intuitive to us. It has a reputation for being mystifying mainly because of its history rather than what it really is as a theory.
The rules of the brain are such that the chimp can freeze our brain, freezing the human out and can make decisions on our behalf.
Smell is an outlier. The way smell works is that the brain essentially sent out a little tentacle into the world, those nerve fibres are the only contact between the central nervous system and the external world. This is the point at which there is no barrier between the brain and the outside world.
The brain can be thought of as a blank slate, yet it comes with certain built-in constraints and proclivities. Every culture recognizes the octave, because it's grounded in physics, a simple 2:1 frequency ratio. Every culture also uses the perfect fifth, 3:2. And every culture divides the octave into a discrete set of steps for their scale, usually between five and eight.
All ideas and questions might be very interesting, and children has to experience that their questions are equally valued as those coming from a grown up or a Nobel Prize winner.
The fact that you and I are alive is against stupendous odds. One day we will die, and that's sad, but there are people who will never die because they were never born. We're the lucky ones, we get to die.
It is, in fact, what we call an enterogastrone hormone — an ileal brake hormone — that sends the signal that enough is enough, stop.