>>Jason Silva: I'm addicted to wonder.
You know, Carl Sagan, he coined the term "wonder junkie" in the novel "Contact" to describe
the Ellie Arroway character, to describe that existential itch, that existential restlessness
that makes us seek out, to transcend our boundaries by any means necessary.
Now, I also think that "wonder" is a precursor to awe.
Now, A recent study out of Stanford actually looked at the subject of awe and they described
"awe" as an experience of such perceptual expansion, such perceptual vastness that you
literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate that experience.
You literally get reset by awe.
And it turns out that regular encounters with awe actually leave us with residual feelings
of well-being and altruism and compassion towards other people.
So blowing our own minds is therapeutic.
So how to create these contexts, how to summon these awe-like experiences?
Well, you know, Tom Robbins says, You cannot manufacture imagination or wonderment but
what you can do is pull people so radically out of context that you force them to gawk
in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday wonders they are culturally disposed to ignore.
So, again, how do we decondition our thinking?
How do we transcend our cultural reality wonders and our cultural operating systems and force
ourselves to see the world anew?
To transcend the been-there's and done-thats of the adult mind and instead become the uncompromising
child voyagers that can retain a child's eye view of what might be.
So one of the things that puts me in a state of wonder and awe is technology, particularly
the fact that technology evolves exponentially.
Two of my heros, Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, they founded Singularity University with the
backing of Google actually to teach people to think exponentially.
The best way to very quickly get our linear brains to understand the implications of exponential
progress is to use Ray Kurzweil's 30 steps example.
He says, If you take 30 linear steps, one, two, three, four five, by step 30 you get
to 30.
That's how our linear brains interpret the world.
But when you take 30 exponential steps, you would go two, four, eight, 16, by step 30,
you are at a billion.
That's why your smartphone today is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and
a thousand times more powerful than what used to a $60 million supercomputer that was half
a building in size 40 years ago.
So what used to be half a building now fits in your pocket.
What currently fits in your pocket in the next 25 years will be the size of a blood
cell, reverse-engineering it from inside out.
So the supercomputers of yesterday are now in everybody's hands.
Now, how do we leverage these supercomputers to transform the world, right?
As Peter Diamandis said, "Today individuals, passionate individuals, can do what only governments
and corporations could do a couple decades ago."
So how to get this idea out there, how to infect people with this sense of possibility.
So a year and a half ago, I started making a series of web shorts.
I called them philosophical espresso shots.
And they're basically psychedelic art films about futurism.
And I use the word "psychedelic" here because the very root of the word "psychedelic" is
"to manifest the mind."
And what is technology if not the manifestation of our dreams, right?
The psychedelic dream of mind expansion has been literalized by our tools.
Our smartphones are psychedelic tools through which we extend the boundaries of thought.
So I started doing these films and I want to show you one of these right now.
And it's about the power of ideas to transform the world, because it all starts with memes.
We graduated from genes.
Now we're trading in memes.
So let's play "Radical Openness."
[ Video playing ] [ Scribes don't have audio ]
>>> -- says our
ability to create virtual models in our heads combined with our modest-looking thumbs was
sufficient to usher in the secondary force of evolution called technology, and it will
continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.
This is unbelievable stuff.
It speaks to the telescopic nature of evolutionary change.
More change in the last hundred years than in the last billion years.
Terence McKenna actually wrote, "From the moment that human beings invented language,
biological evolution essentially ceased and evolution became a cultural epigenetic phenomenon."
Now we've taken matter of low organization, we've put it through our mental filters, and
we extrude it in the form of space shuttles and iPhones.
You know, the Imaginary Foundation tells us that what imagination does is it allows us
to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present
forward to meet it.
You know, imagine how impoverished this world would have been if we hadn't invented the
technology of the oil painting in time for van Gogh or the technology of the musical
instrument in time for Beethoven and Mozart to unfurl through it.
You know, with the revolution to biotechnology, nanotechnology, the free exchange of information
is allowing us to conceive of radical new things.
Freeman Dyson says, "In the future new generations of artists will be writing genomes with the
fluency that Blake and Byram wrote verses."
"What is great in man," said Nietzsche, "is that he is a bridge and not an end."
You know, we're on a trajectory, smack in the middle between the born and the made,
wrote Kevin Kelly, and so radical openness, it's huge.
It's a universe of possibility.
It's gray infused by color.
It's the invisible revealed.
It's the mundane blown away by awe.
We need to cultivate radical openness as a way of participating in accelerating evolution.
Wow!
[ Video concludes ] [ Cheers and applause ]
>>Jason Silva: Thank you.
Thank you so much.
You know, I kind of make these films as a way to capture the kind of impermanent nature
of inspiration.
You know, inspiration a lot of times is defined by the fact that it's a lonely experience
and is very temporary.
And we do our best as artists to try to capture that, to sort of solidify it, to immortalize
it so that it can be shared with other people.
And, you know, I talk a lot about technology in this video, particularly the exponential
nature of technology.
I'm a big fan of Kevin Kelly who refers to technology as the technium, the seventh kingdom
of life, subject to the same evolutionary forces.
The cognitive philosopher Andy Clark wrote in his book "Natural Born Cyborgs" that technology
is actually our second skin.
It's our scaffolding.
It's our appendage.
Just like a termite colony is temperature-controlled, these tools are us.
We need to get over our skin bag bias and realize that we are impregnating mind onto
the world.
That is what we do.
That is our role.
"Manifold the wonders.
Nothing towers more wondrous than man," as Sophocles says.
So again, I put these videos out to inspire people and, you know, we're seeing now really
the revolution and domestication of space exploration.
This is something that is a metaphor, I think, for the expansion of our minds.
There's a great book called "Rocket Dreams" that says when we dream of space -- and I
talk about this in this next video -- when we dream of space, we're really dealing of
transcendence.
We are dreaming of what we might become.
We see ourselves reflected in those glistening stars.
And I love this idea.
So I want to leave you with a video on that metaphor, that notion, that when we expand
outwards, we're really expanding inwards.
So let's play "Space."
[ Video playing ] >>> You know, with the advent of the commercial
space revolution, with the fact that human beings are finally going to domesticate space
travel, it's worth celebrating for once why we want to explore the heavens to begin with.
And Marina Benjamin perhaps has the best line.
She says, "When we dream of space, we dream of transcendence.
We dream of what we might become.
The exploratory journey.
That desire to break through boundaries, to probe the perimeters of possibility, to explore
the adjacent possible, that is what it means to be human."
"We didn't stay in the case," says Kurzweil.
We didn't stay on the planet.
With biotechnology, we won't stay within the limitations of biology.
In fact, today by leveraging exponentially emerging technologies, we're going to have
computers trillions of times more powerful navigating space ships that are millions of
times cheaper, taking us to space.
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is going to take artists into space.
What's going to happen when poets and artists look down upon the Earth?
What new reflections will uplift the human spirit, that will thrust human consciousness
towards the luminance might transpire.
When we keep pushing beyond all limits, when we get to Kubrick's beyond the infinite, the
place where dreams are born through the wormhole, down the rabbit hole.
It's glorious.
It's what Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "Doing what's never been done before is intellectually
seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.
It's what we do.
It's what makes us cosmic heroes, cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural
order that kills everyone."
So let us go forth.
[ Video concludes ] [ Applause ]
>>Jason Silva: Thank you.
So I'm out of time now but I'll leave you with one line.
Erik Davis, who wrote "Techgnosis," says that as the human design process will -- accelerates
exponentially it will chief a kind of infinite velocity where everything becomes linked with
everything else and matter becomes mind.
So I say we may be flawed stumbling primates, but when we work together, we are primates
that can fly.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]