Dr. Michael Kilgard

What is all this information for?

It's informing me, not just to make us better to beat someone else on a test or anything else like that, but it's just part of who I am.

When I look at a cloud, I've never seen that cloud before.

When I hear a baby coo or a pet a cat, all those experiences are really information rich.

Different cats feel different.

Different clouds look different.

Different babies make different sounds.

And the fact that I get my unique experience, you get your unique experience, is what our great, great, great, great grandfathers told us, that we were unique and special.

And then a lot of people looked at the clockwork universe and said, no, no, no, it's all very deterministic.

It's all very fixed.

It's all very rigid.

You're just a machine that does what it's told.

It doesn't really seem right.

The math guys now tell us as soon as you put three things together in a nonlinear way, it's hard to predict what it's going to do.

And the computer scientists in the world, my brothers, one of them, have finally admitted, we don't fully understand what it's doing.

We don't even know how you could understand it.

It's so rich and complicated.

And we're now okay with that.

That kind of humility about what computers are doing and how they're working can reflect back on our own bodies where I don't know exactly why I make every decision.

I say lots of things I regret.