The problem with beauty is “beauty according to whom?”. Sounds like a subjective thing. Although if you ask David Deutsch, he says even beauty is objective and we just “discover” beauty, we don’t invent it.

It could be in the twists and bends of spacetime in that area.

I would say it’s a paradigm shift kind of problem. So far we’ve taken classical theories and quantized them. But in the case of gravity, the right thing to do would be to start with quantum mechanics and “classicize” it to get gravity: the other way around of what we’ve been doing so far.

Why? Because Nature is quantum mechanical so we should start quantum mechanical, too.

Well, Subir Sarkar from Oxford claims that the universe is not actually in an accelerated expansion and attributes the observations that we have according to which it is in an accelerated expansion to bad data, to the “bulk flow” and he says there’s a dipole observed in the cosmic microwave background that indicates that one part of the observable universe is in expansion while the other is in contraction.

So I don’t know. It might be a local effect and with more data we could conclude that we didn’t look deep and careful enough.

I would “believe” a theory if it was right in other kinds of experiments and also predicted a way to solve the black hole information paradox. For example, if string theory could be found to work well in other experiments and also predicted fuzzballs, then I think it would be pertinent to take fuzzballs really seriously.

I think we will be able to – after all, Nature does work and does stuff in these situations, and what Nature does should be expressable mathematically. But I think this will only work if we start from quantum mechanics, not from classical theories such as relativity – we need to gravitize quantum mechanics not quantize gravity.

There’s an even greater issue for the binding problem: how can spacelike separated entities such as neurons get unified in a single experience? The neurons are not on top of each other but they are each in their own location in spacetime, they have their own frame of reference and they have their own causal lightcone. So how can you unify all that in a single experience if you insist that classical physics is enough?

My hunch is that the brain waves are essential – they are the important factor when consciousness is the topic and not necessarily the computation that’s being done by the brain. It might be that the brain waves are what we are and not mere artifacts of electrical current in the brain.

I would say genetic properties in the sense of heredity and the ability to mutate, but also the ability to repair itself – it’s these properties that evolution through natural selection is based on.