The brain is really hard to see. The whole thing is very large - the human brain is several pounds in weight - but the connections between brain cells, known as synapses, are really tiny. They're nanoscale in dimension. So if you want to see how the cells of the brain are connected in networks, you have to see those connections, those synapses.

If you could map out a human brain, an open question is, if you simulated it, would it be you? Now, as we discussed earlier, we don't have a great definition or even a good technological handle to know whether something is conscious or not just by looking at it, so there's that aspect that we're not ready to answer, I would argue. But it raises very interesting questions about the nature of identity.

Maybe we'll understand more about how the universe came to be, and what forces drove it in the early days and which forces drive it now.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

If you think backwards from a big problem, and you talk to all these other people who have skills and who think forward from their skills, it's very easy to form collaborations because everyone is incentivized to work together.

You can imagine over very long timescales, perhaps far beyond the multi-decade time scale, we might be able to ask very deep questions about why we feel the way we feel about things, or why we think of ourselves in certain ways - questions that have been in the realm of psychology and philosophy but have been very difficult to get a firm mechanistic laws-of-physics grasp on.

We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.