Good afternoon everyone, and welcome
to our session of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas,
We are the Gods, Now.
I'm Ann Mossop from the Sydney Opera House.
I'm one of the curators of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas,
and it's a great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon
to hear from Jason Silva.
When we were planning the Festival,
we really wanted to talk about the future and the impact
of technology on the future, and because of our experience
trying to talk about scientific topics, pessimistic topics,
difficult topics, we decided we really
needed to find somebody who could talk
about the future of technology in a way that
was optimistic and exciting and that
was going to get people to think about these kind of very
complicated and sometimes difficult issues
with a positive undertone to what they were saying.
And we were absolutely so excited
when we came across the work of Jason Silva,
and a few weeks after we talked to Jason
and started to arrange for him to come,
we found out that he was speaking at TED.
And I was fortunate enough to see
him speak there, introducing a video
he had made for that conference, and I thought, yes,
this is something that's going to be really wonderful to see
here in the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
Jason is someone who's hard to categorize.
He's not someone where I can say,
yes, he's the author of XYZ, and he's a professor
here and there.
Jason is a philosopher, a filmmaker, a visionary,
I think.
Someone who, above all, is a really extraordinary
communicator about science, about complexity, and about
the future.
So I'm delighted that he's here to talk to us this afternoon.
Please make sure that your phone are on silent.
Tweet to hashtag #fodi, which has
been hacked because so many of you
are getting so involved in the conversation
that it became a magnet to a lot of people trying
to get you to buy something else.
But we're fixing that, and Twitter is still
going through, so don't hold back.
Jason is going to talk to us for about half an hour, 30 minutes,
40 minutes, and then there'll be plenty
of time for questions and discussion from you
because I think this is something where you will
get a lot of provocative ideas.
So the opportunity to have a conversation with Jason today
is going to be one of the great pleasures of this session.
So please join me in welcoming to Jason Silva.
Wow.
Hi, everybody.
How you guys doing?
Hope you guys are doing great.
We are the gods, now.
What a topic.
Huh?
And I suppose, for me, the big inspiration behind this
came after I read Ernest Becker's book, Pulitzer
Prize winning book, the Denial of Death, 1974.
Pop culture reference for that books,
it's the book that Woody Allen gives Annie Hall in the movie
Annie Hall, and he says, look, you
need to read this so you can understand
where I'm coming from.
And basically the Denial of Death
said that the human condition is characterized,
characterized uniquely, by our awareness of our mortality.
In other words, we're the only species
that is aware that we are mortal beings,
and this causes a tremendous amount of anxiety.
We would go mad if we hadn't come up
with solutions to the death problem.
And throughout history, Ernest Becker
identifies three main solutions to the problem of death.
The first one was the religious solution
to the problem of death.
You create a narrative in which your soul will live forever
in the kingdom of God, and it gets rid of the death issue
because everything will be taken care of in the end.
Now, as technology has increasingly-- science
and technology increasingly made religion sort of more difficult
to believe, we've had to come up with other solutions
to the death problem.
The second main solution to the problem of death
that Ernest Becker identifies is the romantic solution.
You turn your lovers into deities.
She's like the wind.
She's my salvation.
It's the lyric to every pop song.
She is the sun.
But of course, no relationship can ultimately
bear the burden of Godhood.
Eventually, your gods reveal their clay feet,
and all of a sudden, we can't be saved by our lovers
and the anxiety about our mortal coil kicks in again.
Ernest Becker says we are gods with anuses.
We have this capacity to ponder the infinite.
We're seemingly capable of anything.
We can mainline the whole of time
through the optic nerve with our astronomy and with our space
telescopes, and yet we're housed in these heart-pumping,
breath-gasping, decaying bodies.
So to be godly, yet creaturely, is just impossibly cruel.
The last solution to the problem of death
that Ernest Becker identifies, he calls the creative solution,
and I think this is, perhaps, the most interesting one
for a variety of reasons.
Of course, symbolically, to create a solution
allows us to create great works of art,
to create work that will outlive us
and that will outlast us to leave
a sort of symbolic immortality and legacy of that sort.
But also the creative solution to the problem of death,
I think, is the engineering solution.
It's the way through which we remake the world.
It's the way in which we transcend our limitations using
science and technology, and this gets me really excited
because this is, ultimately, how I see technology.
Technology is a scaffolding.
Andy Clark, the cognitive philosopher,
says technology is our second skin.
Terrence McKenna says it's the real skin of our species.
Through technology, we transcend the limitations
of thought, reach, and vision.
We extend ourselves.
We transcend time, space, and distance.
Technology is our extended phenotype, as Dawkins says.
It's really what we are.
Our skyscrapers, our jet engines, that's us.
Just like the termite colony is temperature controlled,
and it's a part of the termite species, so to technology
is a part of who we are.
Now, as Ann said, I'm a filmmaker,
and my background is I worked in television.
I worked for Al Gore's TV network for a number of years,
and I fell in love with the power of short form filmmaking.
I felt that with short form, you could create content
that could spread, that could be shared
in the age of social media.
And when I left current TV, I decided
to create a series of short films, microdocumentaries,
that look at the co-evolution of humans and technology
because I feel so in love with this idea of technology
as a means to transcend our boundaries that I felt
like this was a narrative that needed to be put out there
in the world because we live in this world of doom and gloom.
We live in a media environment where, if it bleeds, it leads,
and there's a reason for that.
My friend Peter Diamandis, founder
of the XPRIZE at Singularity University,
wrote a book called Abundance, Why the Future will
be Much Better Than You Think.
And in the book, it talks about how
we have these overactive amygdalas that we've inherited
from a time where we used to live in the savannas of Africa,
and it was biologically advantageous for us to be
really nervous all the time and always
looking for danger because it kept
us alive against the tiger, so that the tiger wouldn't eat us.
And we've inherited that, but now
we live in a world that is increasingly
safer, increasingly less violent.
I don't know if you guys know the work of Steven Pinker, who
says that the chances of a man dying
at the hands of another man today
are the lowest they've ever been,
or the work of Matt Ridley, who actually shows
the measurable progress that we've made using science
and technology and how the world has actually never been better,
or the work of Hans Rosling, who has the website
gapminder.org that went viral a couple years ago because it
showed how every nation in the world,
by every measurable indicator, has been rising.
Quality of life has been rising over the last 200 years,
but we don't notice this because we
have these overactive amygdalas that are just
looking for danger, and our increasingly wired world
is more than happy to showcase all the danger,
even though it's less than there's ever been before.
Anyway, promise to go slow.
So I decided that there was room,
there was room to start a new conversation about how
we see ourselves and how we see technology,
and I felt that online video had become ubiquitous enough
that we could actually create content that
was short form, that was infectious,
and that people could then spread.
And so I started to do this, and I
created a project, a series of shorts.
I called them Shots of Philosophical Espresso,
and the point of the content is to pull you out
of context in such a dramatic manner
in order to force you to gawk in amazement
at the ubiquitous everyday wonders
that we seem to be culturally disposed to ignore.
OK, so what I'd like to do today is actually
want to walk you through a series of these short films
which will, hopefully, convince you
that we are on our way to becoming gods.
The first film I want to show you is actually
on ode to the power of ideas, and let's play it,
and then we'll talk a little bit about the themes.
You know, I love this idea of radical openess,
the free exchange of information,
the free flow of ideas, creating spaces in which ideas
can has sex as Matt Ridley talks about.
And this is huge because it turns out that ideas are just
as real as the neurons they inhabit,
as James Gleick tell us.
A new kingdom rises above the biosphere.
Denizens of this kingdom are ideas
because ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,
it turns out.
They leap from brain to brain.
They compete for the limited resources of our attention.
They have infectivity.
They have spreading power.
They are what Richard Dawkins calls the new replicators, born
from the primordial soup of human culture.
Their vector of transmission is language
and electronic communication.
And though ideas are not made of nucleic acid,
they have achieved more evolutionary change
and at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
You know, Ray Kurzweil says our ability
to create virtual models in our heads
combined with our modest looking thumbs was sufficient to usher
in a 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 100 years
than in the last billion years.
Terrance McKenna actually wrote, "From the moment
that human beings invented language,
biological evolution essentially ceased,
and evolution became a cultural epigenetic phenomenon."
Now, we take in matter of low organization,
we put it through our mental filters,
and we extrude it in the form of space shuttles and iPhones.
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 over
to meet it.
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.
With the revolutions in biotechnology
and nanotechnology, the free exchange of information
is allowing us to conceive of radical new things.
Freeman Dyson says, "In the future,
a new generation of artists will be writing genomes
with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote versus." "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 born and the made, wrote Kevin Kelly.
And so radical openess, 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 openess
as a way of participating and accelerating evolution.
Wow.
Wow, indeed.
Thank you.
Was that loud enough?
Yeah?
People often ask me why video, why art.
At the end of the day, I'm not a technologist.
I'm not a scientist even though the message
I'm putting out there is that, increasingly,
a small group of passionate people,
a small group of passionate technologists,
can do what only huge corporations and governments
could do mere decades ago, and this is happening
on the back of these exponentially
growing technologies.
And I'm going to get into that, but I'd
like to share with you a line by Marshall McLuhan, which I think
really sums up why I use short form video to kind
of infect people with awe.
And he says, "It's always been the artist
who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who
recognizes that the future is the present,
and who uses his work to prepare the grounds for it."
Now, one of the things that video obviously talks about
is the power of ideas to transform the world.
You heard me say that even though ideas, even
though memes, are not made of nucleic acid,
they still have achieved more evolutionary change,
more change than biological evolution ever did.
And in order to understand this, you
have to understand that this change is happening
on the back of these exponentially emerging
technologies.
Now, exponential growth is counter intuitive to the way
our brains perceive the world.
See, our brains evolved in a world that
was linear and local, but we now live
in the world that is global and exponential.
Essentially, we have obsolete brains.
Our brains cannot make sense of this rate of change,
so we really need to educate each other.
My friend Ray Kerzweil, who's a world famous futurist
and has an amazing track record of predicting
these exponential changes, he uses a famous example.
It's really simple, but I think it's important
that people take it in in order to understand what
makes this kind of radical change possible.
And he says take 30 steps.
If you take 30 steps linearly, you
go one, two, three, four, five.
30 steps later, you get to 30.
That's pretty simple.
That's how our brains make extrapolations about distance
and about what's coming and about the future.
Now, if you take those same 30 steps,
but you take them exponentially, you
would go two, four, eight, 16.
30 steps later, you'd be at a billion.
That's the difference between linear growth
versus exponential growth.
30 steps, one to 30.
30 steps, one to a billion.
And that accounts for the reason that the cell phone
in one's pocket today, the average smartphone
is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller,
and 1,000 times more powerful than a supercomputer
that was $60 million bucks, half a building in size
40 years ago.
So what used to be half a building now
fits in your pocket.
So the tools to change the world are in everybody's hands.
The supercomputers of yesteryear are in everybody's hands.
A young person with a cell phone in Africa
today has better communications technology than the US
president had 25 years ago.
This is also out of Peter Diamandis book Abundance.
So consider what that means.
So it used to be half a building.
Now, it fits in your pocket.
In 25 years, it'll be the size of a blood cell.
It'll be reverse engineering us from inside.
Computers trillions of times more powerful than the ones
we have today will be inside of our bodies.
You talk about the co-evolution of humans and technology,
people think technologies this separate artificial thing.
It's in symbiosis.
It's a who and what we are.
It's a part of who and what we are,
and eventually, we're going to close the loop
because the technologies going to go inside of us.
I'm very excited about the three overlapping
revolutions we're seeing.
Obviously, information technology
piggybacking on Moore's law, the computers
get faster every two years, twice as powerful,
half the size, et cetera, et cetera, they're shrinking.
Then we also have biotechnology, and biotechnology
means mastering the information processes of biology,
understanding that our biology is software,
and that software can be upgraded.
Just like we upgrade our iOS on our iPhone,
we're going to be able to upgrade
our biological software.
The famed futuristic Juan Enriquez
says you know why this gets really exciting?
Because when you can master the information processes
of biology, you have software that
can write its own hardware.
Computers could never do that, but biology can.
We have the world's first artificial organism
created a few years ago by Craig Venter.
Man creates life.
Man becomes God.
Alan Harrington wrote a book called the Immortalist, where
he says, "Death has become an imposition on the human race
and is no longer acceptable, and any philosophy that accepts
death must itself be considered dead,
it's questions meaningless, it's consolations worn out."
Perhaps these technologies are our rehearsal.
Perhaps by reverse engineering life,
we have decommissioned natural selection,
as Edward O. Wilson says, and now we
get to look deep within ourselves
and decide what we wish to become.
Evolution has woken up.
Evolution has evolved its own evolvability.
As Kevin Kelly said in that video, "We're on a trajectory
smack in the middle between the born and the made."
Man is a bridge, and not an end.
The other revolution we're seeing
is in artificial intelligence.
We create non-biological intelligence,
sentience that is not limited by the inherent limitations
of biology, digital minds that can be endlessly upgraded.
People worry about it.
They think the Terminator scenario
because they're like, oh, those things are going to take over,
but those things are us.
They're us.
The cognitive philosopher Andy Clark
says we need to get over our skin bag bias, which
is this assumption that only what is within our tissue that
is natural, and that what we create is somehow unnatural,
but that's not true.
Technology is an outgrowth of the human mind.
Technology is imagination made manifest.
Technology's psychedelic.
The word psychedelic means mind manifesting.
Terrance McKenna says we live inside
of condensations of our imagination, and we really do.
Somebody dreamed of flight.
Now, we fly in aircrafts all over the world
with our smartphones, devices made of plastic and metal.
We punch a few buttons, and we send our thoughts
through time and space, transcending time, space,
distance.
We're gods.
Another thing that's often talked about,
and this next video I'm going to you,
is this idea of mind over matter because, obviously, this
is used in New Age bumper stickers.
Oh, mind over matter, our thoughts can change the world.
But I'm interested in more concrete examples
of how imagination can transform the world.
And I love the writer David Deutsch.
His book, the Beginning of Infinity,
really turned me on because he's just totally out there
with his examples of mind over matter.
So I decided to create a video that
is demonstrative of just how our thoughts can spill over,
terraform and transform the planet and, maybe,
the universe.
Next video, please.
Two, one, zero.
I am very much an optimist.
I'm reminded of Rich Doyle's line from Darwin's Pharmacy.
He says, "Dreams do not lack reality."
They are real patterns of information.
The Imaginary Foundation says that the role
of human imagination is to conceive
of all these delightful futures, choose
the most amazing and exciting and ecstatic possibility,
and then pull the present forward to meet it.
That is what we do.
We bring our imaginings into existence.
But I think that as technology has advanced,
we found ways to outsource our mental capacities
to our tools so much more.
Our ability to manipulate the physical world
has increased in an exponential fashion
so we've been able to shrink the lag time between our imaginings
and their instantiation in the real world.
David Deutsch speaks, in his new book,
the Beginning of Infinity.
He says if you look at the topography
of the island of Manhattan today,
that topography is a topography in which
the forces of economics and culture and human intent
have trumped the forces of geology.
I mean, the topography of Manhattan
today is no longer shaped by mere geology.
It's shaped by the human mind and by economics
and by culture.
So what David Deutsch extrapolates is that,
ultimately, that will be the fate of the whole universe.
He says gravitation and antimatter might only
shape the universe at its earliest and least
interesting stages.
But eventually, the whole entire thing
will be subject to the intent of substate-independent,
infinitely more powerful minds, and to conceive of that, just--
it makes me feel ecstatic.
That's true.
Thank you, thank you.
I do feel ecstatic when I contemplate
these possibilities.
Just reveling in those possibilities gets me off.
I have a mindgasm, literally.
And I started to create these videos, a part of me,
is just because I'm a control freak.
I'm profoundly haunted by the impermanence of life
and by the impermanence of inspiration.
Inspiration is a profoundly fleeting and profoundly lonely
experience, and I think the goal of any artist,
whether it be in paint or in song or in cinema,
is an attempt to put people in one's head,
to invite us to smash our sense of separateness
and to say this is how the dots connected inside
of my consciousness.
I hope that I can communicate that to you,
and I hope that you can understand that.
I'd like to share with you a quote by Alain de Botton, one
of my favorite philosophers out of the UK.
And he says-- and this has to do with the power of art
to communicate, to make people feel something
as compared to, let's say, journalism.
So he says, "The artist is willing to sacrifice a naive
realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper source,
like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist
in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths
about it that find no place in the other's literal grip."
I'm trying to get into the implications of what's
happening on the back of these exponential emerging
technologies.
When we reverse engineer life itself,
when biology becomes the new canvas
for our aesthetic design, what new forms of genius
might come out of that?
As Kevin Kelly said in my first video,
how impoverished would this world
have been were not for the invention, or the technology,
of the oil painting, allowing Van Gogh to unfurl through it?
What new genius will come out with inventions we cannot even
conceive of yet?
When people worry about disruptive technologies,
they worry about their jobs.
Half the jobs that exist today didn't
exist 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
Most of jobs that are going to exist 20 years from now
don't exist today.
What new forms of artistry, what new forms
of human expression, what new occupations and vocations will
emerge out of these tools in our ongoing co-evolution
with these tools?
And what I love about using cinema to convey these ideas
was probably described best by Gene Youngblood
in his book, Expanded Cinema.
He said that cinema, like life itself,
is a process of becoming, a part of man's
ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness
outside of his mind in front of his eyes.
Now, something perhaps a little more practical
that we talk about on the back of these technologies
is the issue of Big Data and privacy and companies
and corporations and governments knowing
more and more of our behavior and being
able to take everything we do and turn it
into an algorithm that can maybe predict what we'll
want before we know we want it.
And I was quoted yesterday in a panel
that I think things like targeted advertisement
are just engineered serendipity.
It doesn't actually concern me.
I'm more about the idea of radical openness,
and when I think of Big Data, I actually
get excited by the new forms of self-insight
that might emerge from that.
I read recently an article that said that apparently,
when forager ants hunt for food, the patterns of how they
do that mirror the TCP/IP protocols that control
information flow on the internet.
What?
I went to an exhibit at the MoMA in New York called Talk to Me,
where they showed me this graphic animation that
showed the world, and there was these things
that looked like weather patterns flowing out of it.
And they were like, no, that's actually
the diaspora of people leaving conflict zones.
It looked like weather patterns.
I think what we're finding is that the more we can measure
in the internet of things, walking around with computers
in our pockets that are measuring what we like,
what we buy, where we go, what we search for, et cetera, et
cetera, et cetera, when mapped out, when we get
the long view, when we get the big picture, what we're seeing
is these patterns keep recurring from the nano to the galactic,
from the organic to the man made.
And we're realizing it's all part of a continuum,
and all of it is nature unfolding.
It's complexity unfolding.
It's just unfolding in different scales and in different rounds,
but we are of nature.
We feel like autonomous free agents, going around our lives,
but then the patterns that work in the organic world
work in the man made world.
You know, I heard Steven Johnson,
who wrote his book, Where Good Ideas Come From,
A Natural History of Innovation-- he
has a lot of great examples of how he calls the coral
reef the city of the sea because it turns out
that the patterns of biological innovation in the coral
reef that make it the most biologically
diverse environment in the ocean mirror
the patterns of innovation of cities,
which are where the most memes are created.
Has to do with the diversity and the collision
of ideas and the amount of idea sex
that's happening in cities as comparable to coral reefs.
So what does this tell us?
If we want to innovate more, we need
to create these spaces in which ideas can have sex.
We need to promote this free flow of information.
We need to promote transparency so that we contain
more and more self-insight into how we work.
And so I decided to make a video about this.
This is my homage to Big Data, and I call it--
I was inspired by Isaiah Berlin's quote, "To understand
is to perceive patterns."
So let's roll that video.
To understand is to perceive patterns.
Now, of course, what this means is
that true comprehension comes when the dots are revealed,
and you get to Steven Johnson's long view,
and you see the big picture.
This is an idea about patterns, patterns, patterns,
recurring patterns across different scales of reality.
You know, Paul Stamets talks about the mycelial architype
and how the information sharing systems
that comprise the internet look exactly
like computer models of dark matter in the university,
look exactly like the neurons in the brain.
They all share the same intertwingled, filamental
structure.
It's the rise of networkism as Big Data advocates
talk about how man made systems are looking exactly
like natural systems, and the more we can measure,
the more we can visualize.
The more we can visualize, the more it
expands our consciousness by seeing these recurring patterns
across scales of reality blows my mind,
and I think that technology, increasingly,
is becoming an expander of human consciousness,
and extends our thought, reach, and vision
and revealing so much more.
It's like whereas once I was blind, now I can see.
Jeffery West from the Santa Fe Institute
is telling us that cities are really like organisms.
Alleys are like capillaries.
How is it possible that a man made,
artificial, technological system is
behaving like a natural system?
The more efficient it becomes, the more
it's starting to look like nature.
Really interesting, weird stuff.
But it makes me optimistic.
It's like what Steven Johnson says.
Look, if we can understand all the stuff, I mean,
anything becomes possible.
It's the adjacent possible standing
as a sort of shadow future, a map of all
the ways the present can reinvent itself.
It's beautiful stuff.
It is beautiful stuff.
Thank you so much, guys.
I love Steven Johnson.
His new book Future Perfect talks about pure progressives
and the power of peer networks to solve
problems, which I think is amazing.
But that last line about the adjacent possible,
I think that's a great takeaway message for us to constantly
probe, our adjacent possible.
I mean, don't you love that, the idea
that we shouldn't look upon the world as it is?
We should look upon the world and see
what it could turn into.
Its this shadow future.
We should draw the maps of all the ways
in which the present can reinvent itself.
Now, those videos, when I started doing them,
they were a noncommercial experiment.
I created a name.
I created an art form.
I called them Shots of Philosophical Espresso.
Really, it was just an excuse to communicate ideas the way
that I enjoyed communicating them,
which is like with this ecstatic excitement, this attempt
to immortalize and hold in stasis inspiration itself.
I think it's very indicative of this idea
that we should not go quietly into the night,
but we should rage, rage against dying of the light.
If the purpose of the human machine civilization
is to transcend all previous limits and turn into gods,
or as Stewart Brand says we are as gods
and might as well get good it, then I
was going to start by not letting
those fleeting, exquisite moments of inspiration
go to waste, but rather I was going
to immortalize them, which is what I love to do, and then
share them with people all around the world.
And they've been seen over a million times now,
and I think it's indicative that people
are hungry for this kind of like high level discourse,
but they want it to be compressed.
They say, I don't feel entitled to ask people for their time
because I know that we're saturated in, media
and we have what's called cognitive bandwidth anxiety.
We just can't process all the information that's
coming at us, so that's really the inspiration for this.
But fundamentally, at the end of the day, what
I want to communicate to you guys is a sense of awe
and a sense of wonder.
One of my heroes, Carl Sagan, was
exceptionally good at doing this.
Timothy Leary, Bucky Fuller used to call
themselves performing philosophers.
They'd take these intergalactic sized ideas
and then use the power of media communication
to spread those ideas, to turn them
into self-replicating memes that can go out into the world.
And this idea of awe as a kind of reassuring quality,
an ability to contemplate our own existence
and marvel at ourselves, as Sophocles says,
manifold the wonders, nothing towers more wondrous than man.
It's about creating narratives that are positive.
It's about awakening the mind's attention
from the lethargy of custom and the film of familiarity
and redirecting it, instead, to the wonders of existence
because there are an unending amount of wonders.
And so I got really turned on when
I saw this study out of Stanford that says,
guess what, blowing our minds on a regular basis
is actually psychologically beneficial.
Every time we push our perceptual boundaries
beyond their limits, we are reborn and refreshed and reset,
and it leaves us with profound benefits.
So I thought that's cool because if my videos are
noncommercial shots of espresso to inspire people with awe,
and now awe is actually good for us,
why not make a video that informs you with a bit of awe
while telling you what awe is and why it matters.
So for my last video, which is called the Biological Advantage
of Being Awestruck, I am hopeful that it gives you the chills.
And you'll notice I speak a lot slower in it
because it's a more contemplative piece.
I hope that it elicits a sense of just cosmic wow.
Watch the next video.
Eminent psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
has written of the biological advantage of being awestruck.
"How fortuitous," he says, "for a species
to find its own ability to contemplate,
to marvel at its own existence, has
been evolutionarily advantageous."
In other words, it has been biologically selected
for because it informs out life with a sense
of cosmic significance that makes us work harder
to persist and to survive.
In other words, awe has helped us survive.
And you know, a recent study out of Standford
on the subject of awe kind of validates this idea.
They have found that regular incidences of awe
leave residual benefits upon the individual that persist,
such as increased feelings of empathy and compassion
towards others, increased feelings of altruism,
and increased feelings of general well-being.
In this study, they defined awe as an experience
of such perceptional expansion, such perceptional vastness,
that you literally have to reconfigure, upgrade,
your mental schemata just to accommodate, just
to take in the scale of the experience.
This is amazing.
We've all felt this before.
The first time we stared upon the Grand Canyon
or succumbed to the immersive power of an Imax film.
But perhaps the most exquisite account
of the experience of awe was articulated
by the brilliant Ross Anderson when
writing about the Hubble space telescope.
Pay attention.
He says that the Hubble has given us nothing less
than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning of what is,
allowing us to contemplate space and time on a scale just
shy of infinite.
Wild.
He says gazing upon the famous deep field photograph literally
allows us to mainline the whole of time
through the optic nerve.
To fit something so impossibly large through something
so impossibly small is incredible.
He says through the sheer aesthetic force
of its discoveries, the Hubble distills the impossibly complex
abstractions of astrophysics into these singular expressions
of color and light, vindicating Keith's famous couplet,
"Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty."
Thank you.
That's cool.
You know, even now, this idea, this notion
that an instrument of man, a cosmic optic nerve
floating in space can distill the abstractions
of astrophysics into expressions of color and light-- I mean,
it just spoke so vividly to me.
I'd like to share with you one more quote about just
think of the telescope as a metaphor for what technology
does as an instrument of mind expansion.
"In it's time," and this is by Ross Anderson.
"In it's time, the telescope has transformed the night sky
from a decorated ceiling, a fixed sphere of glittering
stick figure gods, into a universe whose reaches
carry the seeds of this earth and new earths still."
And I'd like to leave you with one more
line that puts me in total awe.
It's from a website called Next Nature that
has been kind enough to feature my work.
They say that design, and this is
what's important for artists, really, to pay attention to.
"Design is about to undergo a paradigm shift.
Today, design starts at the level of the atom.
We are drifting into the world of the invisible.
Virtual realities, nano, and biotechnologies
are increasingly influencing our aesthetics
and providing new construction kits for our reality."
And I think the big takeaway here can be echoed by, again,
the brilliant Alan Harrington, who's out of print
to work The Immortalist, I recommend to everyone.
Gore Vidal called it the greatest book ever written.
And he says, "We must never forget
we are cosmic revolutionaries, not
stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that
kills everyone."
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Thank you.