From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There are really only three types of people: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who say, 'What happened?' Which group would you rather be in?
Once we take their quantum property into account, space and time changes dramatically. Space is granular, because one of the characteristics of quantum theory is to show that continuous things have often a granular structure, like light, which is a cloud of photons. Similarly, time cannot be anymore understood ad an external independently flowing entity. Time is just he counting of granular happenings in nature.
Bias means your mind, your experiences, and your knowledge is too narrow to take in and truly appreciate the person standing in front of you.
We are fields endowed with consciousness and free will, existing in a reality deeper than the familiar realm of space, time, and interacting objects. Consciousness exists independently of any physical form; it resides in the underlying field that instantiates the matter and energy we measure in space and time.
The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.
Space triggers that innate curiosity in us about what's out there, where we came from, and the possibilities those answers could bring. Humans are explorers – our imaginations can run wild- it's in our DNA. Our fascination with space links to our ability to dream, to wonder, to be curious and to have big ideas.
We come from mammals, we are mammals… we're just mammals that wear clothes. We're destimulated – we don't feel the cold, the heat, everything in our environment – even though our physiology is built for it. Our vascular system responds naturally to temperature changes by dilating and contracting our muscles; but we've allowed them to lose this fitness, to lose their conditioning – and so our hearts compensate.
I can see from people I've lost in my life that the thing you leave behind is love, so I hope I've created a bit of that too… I know I've been lucky to receive a lot.
We want to be influenced because we want to be right. We want to take the more adaptive strategies in any situations in order to have good outcomes. It's an evolutionary psychological adaptation.
Success is different for everyone, but for me success has always been about finding meaning and personal fulfillment. While that may have meant different things at different times in my life, learning, making meaningful connections with people and helping others achieve this same level of satisfaction has been a sign of success for me.
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.
Space is a pretty scary place. Here on Earth, we're surrounded by nature and a nice blue sky. You don't realise that 16km above you, things start to go black…. 100km it's an inhospitable vacuum that will kill you in less than 60 seconds. Think how far we've come as humanity- we're a living species who have managed to escape our own planet.