Quotes from John Brockman

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can't see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind—much like the visible aspect of the universe—is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.

A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.

After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called "time span of discretion," or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake.

It's natural to worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should really worry about is psychological stuff like ideologies and norms. As the UNESCO slogan puts it, "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.

Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up.

Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery.

In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

it is difficult to discern where "you" end and the remainder of the world begins.

Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity.

Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it's got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It

Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results.

What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.

Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection—natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science.

Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world.

Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong.

delight in good ideas.

Illusions are a necessary consequence of intelligence. Cognition requires going beyond the information given, to make bets and therefore to risk errors. Would we be better off without visual illusions? We would in fact be worse off—like a person who never says anything to avoid making any mistakes. A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.

In biology especially, we have labels for everything—molecules, anatomical parts, physiological functions, organisms, ideas, hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information.

We all start from radical ignorance in a world that is endlessly strange, vast, complex, intricate, and surprising. Deliverance from ignorance lies in good concepts—inference fountains that geyser out insights that organize and increase the scope of our understanding.

I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?")

The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we've learned, while appreciating and categorizing the extent and limitations of what we know, plays a big role in how we think.