At their very best, technologies of media
are engines of empathy.
Cinema, perhaps the pinnacle, the cathedral
of communication technology, allows
you to experience the world from another's point of view,
ultimately at its best acting as a catalyst for you
to be more compassionate and empathic towards the other.
Now, looking towards the future, there's a lot of talk
now about virtual reality.
The Oculus Rift has finally captured
the imagination of the public.
And this is now becoming real, the idea
of fully immersive, technologically mediated dream
worlds, rendered mind spaces where you literally inhabit
another world, portals to another world.
These are not virtual realities.
These are going to be real virtualities.
And what is this ultimately all about?
Well, Terence McKenna says, these technologies
will allow us to share our dreams with one another.
Everybody will have essentially a cosmos of the imagination
where they can build cathedrals of the mind.
Imagine the intimacy that becomes possible
when people meet and they say hey, do you want to come visit
my world.
Do you want to see what it's like to be inside my head?
What kind of intimacy?
It's like turning ourselves inside out.
The metaphor used by Terence McKenna is that of the octopi.
This is what becomes possible.
The octopi transfigurates to merge with its environment.
It literally wears its linguistic intent
outside its skin.
It wears its mind, its nervous system, outside its skin.
Its way of communicating is something that can be beheld.
Language becomes something that can be visually beheld.
Us humans, you know-- grunts, and voices,
and funny faces to try to imbue, to read what one another
is thinking and feeling, imagine if with virtual reality,
we all become like octopi and wear
our minds outside our skin.
Imagine the intimacy that becomes possible.
This is really what excites me about virtual reality,
about these sacred modalities of intimacy
exchanging shared intersubjectivity that
become possible.
Think about that.