Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [October 28, 2022]

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Why were only a few species domesticated? Could any species be domesticated? Are humans domesticated? - Does conditioning have anything to do with domestication? - Since an octopus has nine brains, including one in each leg, how does it see the world? - Every animal has different capabilities, with their own advantages and disadvantages. Dolphins are fast, but they're not fast on land. - Would you agree that humans are the most "flexible" and can "adapt" to learn the most among Earth species? - Other species' communication is domain specific and our communication is universal, right? - I believe the mapping between the world and brain zones is a super-simple geometrical mapping that makes good sense. I wonder what this brain-leg mapping would be. Legs are further away from each other than a leg and a brain. - Do you think it's possible that we might live inside a cosmic super-organism, analogous to the way microbes live inside of us? - Is there a way to tell how much of our intelligence emerges from high-level brain functions vs. low-level cellular computation? - What is the simplest possible object? - Can you explain why the default scientific position is that consciousness does not rely on quantum mechanics? To me, it seems obvious that it would to at least some degree. - Why is it that we as observers never see quantum superpositions? Why are superpositions aligned to our macroscopic observations? - Could it then be that what is quantum mechanics to us just involves higher dimensions of time? The fact that quantum mechanics is incomprehensible to us is then because we are trying to understand-higher dimensional time from a single dimensional experience of time. - Why do my glasses get foggy but my eyeballs don't? - Fog can't create droplets on a wet surface. - And let's not forget the eyelids, which act as windscreen wipers!