Science

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.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

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.

Sleep medicine specialist and NHS consultant neurologist studying sleep disorders

From a rather dispassionate, clinical perspective, and if you remove the awful consequences that people experience when something does go wrong, you can see conditions like synesthesia as nature's experiments. We can learn a lot about the underlying functioning of our nervous system.

Sleep medicine specialist and NHS consultant neurologist studying sleep disorders

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.

Sleep medicine specialist and NHS consultant neurologist studying sleep disorders

There are significant distinctions between what we perceive to be reality and the cold, hard, molecular world we inhabit. Our brains are constantly taking shortcuts to inform us about the world and this introduces an intrinsic error which our brains are filling in.

Sleep medicine specialist and NHS consultant neurologist studying sleep disorders

We have no idea about the world that we inhabit and that what the brain is doing is really creating an entire shortcut that enables us to understand the world without being able to physically really understand the reality in which we inhabit, which is a mind-blowing concept.

Sleep medicine specialist and NHS consultant neurologist studying sleep disorders

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.

Philosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism

If we now want a science of consciousness, we need to find a way of bringing consciousness back into the domain of science. We need to find a way of bringing back together these two domains that Galileo separated. And that is really the challenge as I see it.

Philosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism

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.

Philosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism

Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.

Philosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism

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!!

Six years ago, I got a phone call in Boston, an investor asked me what I thought about cultured meat? ..my answer was that it's probably one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life.! And the question is, why? It's supposed to be obvious! When you take muscle cells, fat cells, or stem cells (that can become both muscle and fat), those cells don't grow very well outside of the body – they stop.

I have a deep fascination with the natural world, the problems that living creatures need to solve and how natural selection evolution by natural selection has solved those problems. When it comes to flight... It's all about physics... how you solve the problems raised by physics.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

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. Birds learn when they're young to look at this night sky and learn which bits of the sky don't rotate.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

Flight is a very quick way to get from A to B. It's also a very good way to escape from predators who are stuck on the ground. The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

It is essential to think about it systematically and to include demographics as it's the study of people – who we are, where we are- people are the foundation of every society. There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's, destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.