From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Tuning into these feeling tones reveals their powerful influence – they often control our lives in ways we're completely unaware of.
I often hear people say that everything that matters must be measured, and if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. I believe the absolute reverse. Nothing that matters can be measured. I don't think there's anything on this earth worth lifting a finger for that you can measure.
This principle demands careful consideration of protection that must be given to civilians and civilian property, balancing military objectives against foreseeable collateral damage. This balance cannot be made by a formulaic algorithm – there isn't one – but by human judgment.
I'll hope I have helped be more generative and less extractive, through my own actions, and through my support of others. We live in a world where we're constantly battling these forces and we need to ensure we're more generative than extractive — of each other, of our planet — I believe we can do it.
The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.
The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.
I've learned that people exist on a spectrum, and that's something many observers don't like to acknowledge. But it's a reality across all the wars we cover, on all sides of every conflict. No one thinks exactly the same; some people hold very hawkish views on certain issues while being less so on others.
I was raised in a really unique way, and it gave me a different view on gender and, in some ways, race. I was raised in a commune, and I grew up without mirrors- without vanity. To be without mirrors growing up means that there's no real defined sense of self based on the external. When I came into America however, I was told I was a girl, and this is what you can and can't do… it really is cult like thinking, and gender is a cult, and it's so dull… it's not what we are, it doesn't encompass what we are.
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.
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.
We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.
We scrutinise a photograph with a sense that we are scrutinising the actual objects themselves, although they are distanced from us in time and space.