Amjad Masad

ingredient of generality and how humans reflect on their decisions and their questions and you know we come up with these ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere we call them inspiration um uses whatever people call them it's like oh suddenly i'm struck by this idea like eureka right um

And we don't know how it works in order to build it into machines.

All of like science come, a lot of the scientific, big scientific discoveries come from these eureka moments.

That is not based on prior, on strict prior training.

That is a fundamental paradigm shift, a huge jump that comes from somewhere.

We don't know where it is.

And by the way,

All the original scientists in antiquity and history talked about this in spiritual terms.

I remember reading Bertrand Russell's book about the history of Western philosophy and things like that, and he was talking about Pythagoras.

Pythagoras was running a religious cult

He was not running a mathematics club.

And they came up with all these different theories.

And if you look at the current state of humanity, we're actually not having that much scientific breakthroughs.

And I think counterintuitively, because we've become so mechanistic in our thinking and less spiritual, less open to mystery and mysticism, that degraded the quality of science.

and because science became an industrial process it became a bureaucracy it became government funded it became all of these different things as opposed to as opposed to people seeking true knowledge or original knowledge and trying to seek in all of these different ways and arriving at it and all sorts of random and interesting and

you know, mystical ways.

That's probably true.

I think Newton spent most of his life like

Newtonian physics was a side project.

Most of his life was spent in studying a religious text and doing things like alchemy and random things like that.