From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We've lost our relationship with ourselves; and that is all-encompassing because without a relationship with ourselves, we can't then have a relationship with nature, with each other and the planet.
Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist,' i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible.
The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?
Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast. We all have the ability to perform magic, to endure, to push ourselves beyond our limits, if we have the patience and the resilience.
If you don't have some failures continually, it is a signal that you have retreated into the conservative past. Most people still interpret failure as an unfortunate thing to get to success, but this isn't actually what it means.
When you tell people these things, they get a little fatalistic about it. They tend to think, 'Well, I guess there's not much I can do about that.' I would call that a bias. It is wrong just as often as it's likely to be right. We really need to interrogate and deconstruct that assumption. It's rarely true, and it can lead people to internalise some of these effects in a way that can be pretty damaging and totally unnecessary.
The rate of change has become exponential and us as human beings physiologically have not been able to adapt. We just cannot physiologically adapt that quickly – what does it mean for us? This is in some ways Darwinian because he said it wasn't about the strongest that survives, it's those that are most able to adapt.
When we were first able to make approximately what our fathers made by doing performance, we considered ourselves completely successful and had no ambition beyond that. If we were playing fairs and cruise ships, we were happy.
The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.
The thing that makes us so unique is that we, unlike most every other species, have no niche. A niche is an opportunity which a species exploits- and our niche is niche switching. We move from one niche to another, even without major changes to our physical biology.
The need to express abstract registers of time and deep space, and something of the life of the body, has never altered. Art is not a luxury, an object of exchange, a profession or a career; it is an intrinsic part of being human.
The phrase 'I don't know' serves as both an invitation and a challenge, a beckoning call to delve into the unknown and piece together the enigmatic puzzle of knowledge. Science, at its core, thrives not on regurgitating established facts but on the exhilaration of unearthing new discoveries.