Jason Silva talks to Joe Rogan

Jason:

The cell phone in your pocket today is a million times cheaper, million
times smaller and a thousand times more powerful than the $60 million
super computer was in the 1960s. That was 40 years ago. Thats a billion
fold increase in price and performance thats not stopping! So in the next
25 years, blood cell sized devices a trillion times more powerful
than that will be interfacing with your biological neurons in real
time, and thats not even getting into the spill over into biology.

Freeman Dyson, one of the top physicists in the world says in the near
future new generations of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency
that Blake, Byron and Shakespeare wrote verses. So its this idea that the
canvas of life itself is the new canvas for aesthetic design. Playing
Jazz with biology! Like imagine how impoverished the world would have
been if we hadnt invented the technology of oil painting in time for Van
Gogh or the technology of the instrument in time for Mozart and
Beethoven to unfurl through it. So imagine with the canvas of life, what
might we create with it? I mean we use the alphabet to engender
alphabetic rapture with Shakespeare; what are we going to make
with life?

Joe: Its so amazing to be here right now with it all going down, this is like the
bottom of the funnel, its just happening so fucking ridiculously fast
Jason:

You know what it is, its the first time in history we dont need time
lapse photography to witness it. Like you cant actually see a plant
growing but with time lapse photography you can actually see it
happening and know the plant is alive. If you could see human progress
just over the last 100 years through time lapse you would literally see that
its like our thoughts spilling over into the world. Thats what human
imagination is right? And our ability to conjure up future possibilities, pick
the most delightful one and pull the present forward to meet it. I mean the
airliner the jet plane the internet all started in somebodies mind or a group
of minds and then kind of spilled over. Like we literally live in
condensations of our imagination. Terence McKenna used to say
that which sounds psychedelic but is literally true.

Joe: Ive always thought its so strange that the imagination is this invisible thing
that exists in your head and doesnt really exist, but from that, comes everything
thats solid. Everything thats created has been thought up in the imagination.
And its so weird how we have this flippant view of the imagination. I mean we
value creativity for sure, but just the idea of imagining
Jason:

Yeah we value creativity but we dont give it the kind of status it merits.
James Gleick wrote the Information, its a book that talks about how the
fundamental building blocks of reality might actually be information, it
from bit, where everything is information and he wrote a fantastic
article about how it turns out that our ideas, are just as real as
the neurons they inhabit, ideas form a new kingdom that rises above
the biosphere. Ideas have retained the properties of organisms, they have
infectivity, they have spreading power, they leap from brain to brain, they
compete for the limited resources of our attention, and heres the most
interesting thing, even though ideas are not made of nucleic acid, they
have achieved evolutionary change at an extraordinary rate. So to say
ideas change the world and transform reality is not just a metaphor, they
do transform reality, in fact they transform reality better than
biological evolution ever did.

Terence McKenna actually said that the moment we created language

biological evolution essentially stopped, and evolution became cultural
epigenetic phenomenon. Because now we take in matter of little
organisation and it goes through our mental filters and pops out as
iphones and space shuttles. This is all the human brain. The most complex
thing in universe thats producing the world we inhabit.

Joe: Its like trying to figure out where it is going to go from here, what the fuck is
gonna happen, what is the next break through thats gonna make the internet
look like a landline? Virtual Reality Right?
Jason:

Terence McKenna also said we each increasingly moving into universes

of our own construction. Paola Antonelli , from New York City, she did an
exhibit called the Design and the Elastic Mind and one called Talk to me:
design and communication between people and objects which is about
interfacing with biological tools and is very much the Marshall McLuhan
first we build the tools then they build us and she talks about
existence maximum. Personal iPods for example allow us to create
customized playlists so essentially we can impose sound tracks in our lives
and were each living in different universes because we each scoring our
lives and instrumenting our lives in different ways and reality therefore is
further separated into individual, subjective universes. To say that we live
in our own reality is absolutely true. Instead of living in some sort of
consensus trance were each living in our own customized utopia.

Robert Anton Wilson talks about your reality tunnels. Certainly there is
a kind of consensus reality in that we respect and acknowledge each other
as other entities we share space with, but how I perceive moment to
moment reality is edited by my preconception, stereotypes and
the way I was brought up in certain believe systems and so on and so
forth. These things act as filters that skew how I perceive things and were

all stuck in our reality tunnels and he talks about illumination and
shedding our reality tunnels to see a broader, more interesting, varied
reality.
The first information technology was language in the alphabet , people always
criticize technology. You know when we first invented writing it was said that
Socrates used to say that you should never write anything down as it will rot our
brains and this technology of writing was this terrible thing, and then it becomes
so embedded in our culture. But even language and thinking are technology too
were still relying on various components of the brain to perform various
functions. I think this, what they would call our skin bag bias, this assumption
that its better if it is from within us, I think our minds are actually a dance
between our brains and our environments and our tools. I outsource part of my
cognition to the iphone. Its this whole theory called the extended mind theory,
where you create artful change in the world using the magic wand known as the
iphone that stores part of your memory and allows you to interface with reality
and actually cause a change in reality. Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist
and she says our smartphones give us technologically mediated telepathy. Sms
is basically sending your thoughts through time and space at the speed of light,
by pressing a few buttons you become telepathic. All you have to do is embrace
the fact that that is part of you. Its the extended phenotype that Richard
Dawkins talks about. Like how termites build termite colonies and termite
colonies are part of this termite species. What we produce is part of our
extended phenotype. It is a part of us not separate from us. Emerged and
evolved the same way biological functions and features emerged and evolved.
Kevin Kellies treaties on this, what technology wants, talks about how technology
has direction, has tendencies and what not. And Ray Kurzweil says our ability to
create virtual models, virtual realities in our head, combined simply with our
modest looking thumbs is efficient to usher in literally a secondary force of
evolution called technology that will continue at an accelerating rate until the
entire universe is at our fingertips. And people say oh wow how poetic how
metaphorical, except what he is saying is these exponential growth curves of
technology and impregnating computation into matter with nanotechnology or
impregnating man made evolution into synthetic biology or artificial life the
convergence of these exponentially growing technologies are literally becoming
gods. Stuart Bran says We are gods, might as well get good at it. Like having
invented the gods we can turn into them. What he is saying is instead of praying
for transcendence, lets engineer transcendence , lets engineer ourselves into
blissful utopic existence.
Joe: Hopeful. Or, nuclear war. Thats the other problem. Man is really good at
blowing shit up. It seems like at our highest levels of technology, the best shit we
have, is the shit that can just wipe us out. Has there ever been anything more
impressive than atomic power, Has there ever been anything more impressive
than idea of having a reset button for a whole city.

Jason: We have to accept that technology extends who and what we are, and you
can use the alphabet to compose Shakespearean sonnets or write hate speech.
Something that extends your thoughts reach and vision can be used in any
direction and thats where the cultural conversation comes in
Steven Pinker did a TED talk called the myth of violence, and he says that
contrary to the media envornment, if it bleeds it leads, reality is the world is
getting safer all the time, and the chances of a man dying at the hand of a man
are lower then they have ever been and he chronicles the decline in violence
over the last 100 years and its totally counterintuitive cause its totally not what
you think. Or hans rosling who has a website called gap minder that shows you
the progress across the world and people coming out of poverty. And yet this is
not what you hear in the news.