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

A big part of my job is to remember failure, and reboot failure, when the timing is right.

I spend a lot of time going over old conversation summaries. A lot of the old ones are about ideas that ended in failure, the project didn't work. But hey, you know what? That was five years ago, and now computers are faster, or some new information has come along, the world is different. So we're able to reboot the project.

One of the things that got me transitioning from physical science to brain science was asking, Why do we understand so much about the universe?

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.

It's actually kind of weird that we can comprehend the law of gravity, or that we can understand quantum mechanics, enough at least to make computers.