“Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life… LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science … To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution’s secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.”
-Jason Silva
Interview & Introduction by Theo Constantinou
When I first drank a shot of Jason Silva‘s philosophical espresso, I had no idea that it would send my thoughts and ideas into a whirlwind of questioning all my preconceived notions of life and death. Jason said, in our interview, “Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life…LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science…To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution’s secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.” This notion and way of thinking sent me into a self-analysis and re-understanding of everything that I believe to be true; that death gives life meaning and, our living experience with the knowledge of our eventual death drives us to our maximum potential. There are so many more questions and ideas I want to expand on with Jason, so we are planning on doing an in-depth episode of ‘Rear Window’ that will dive deeper into some of the concepts and philosophy in our interview. Until then, enjoy this interview and open your mind and thoughts to a completely new perspective and understanding of life, death, creativity and imagination.
So I recently did an interview with Steven Grasse of Art in the Age (among other ventures) and he said, “I noticed with young people, a lot of them are very lost. First of all, they’ve been told to go to college, by the … let’s call it the industrial academic complex, that gets them to go to college and get deeply into debt, so that the professors can get tenure and have these glittering campuses. The kids start school, get deep in debt, and they end up taking shit jobs just to pay the debt back. No one really explores anything interesting or meaningful because they don’t have the choice now: they’re zombies. I kind of feel like people should stop going to college and become apprentices, like they used to in the old days: learn a craft, learn a trade … when the shit breaks down, you still have something you can do. You know its very old school.” How do you start to break down barriers inside that system, i.e. the industrial academic complex, and give people real options to explore their minds and interests, instead of becoming zombies inside of that same system? For example, I did the same exact thing that Steve mentions above: went to college got a degree, became a zombie…but somehow was unable to unplug from the system and in turn, was able to start really exploring my true passion with Paradigm. What advice would you give to those out there who are seekers and explorers but are trapped?
I think the educational system was designed for another age. In an age of accelerating disruptive progress, everything needs to be reevaluated, including how we “train” people to engage with the world. Having said that, there is something quite romantic about creating a “context” for the love of learning. Wasn’t the liberal arts college campus once a place to “explore” and “seek” one’s passions? Perhaps schools have become too expensive. Perhaps they have become too obsessed with building “careers” instead of individuals; it’s all up for re-evaluation. There are interesting alternatives. I tend to side with Sir Ken Robinson’s views here. I always say; start with your passion … that opens up the map for everything else.
I’ve heard you quote Terrence McKenna quite a bit in your videos; I tend to quote Joseph Campbell a lot myself. I found this quote by McKenna that says, “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.” In Campbell’s A Hero With a Thousand Faces, the idea of the hero’s journey is to return; it is not enough just to get lost in the world and not bring something back from your journey. Deeper than that, and specifically to this quote, do you think there is a true shift into what McKenna was saying here, that the world and the people of this world’s consciousness is actually starting to wake up and create good ideas?
We know now that ideas are just as real as the neurons they inhabit. They have infectivity and spreading power; they leap from brain to brain. James Gleick explores this in his article “What is a Meme?” There is a new kingdom rising above the biosphere, he says … and the denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas are the new “replicators,” and although they are not made of DNA, they have achieved more evolutionary change at a rate that “leaves the old gene panting far behind.” SO YES: If we are to become agents of evolution; we need to act as transistors: take ideas in, repurpose, remix, and push them back out.
You spoke about bio-technology, and the idea of stopping entropy from killing us in your ‘Imagination’ video. The idea of living forever, or pushing the scope of life beyond average lifetimes is a very complex thought and probably going to be extremely controversial if that idea is ever realized. But my question is this, even if all that is possible, the importance of life is death. Lao-tse from Tao Teh King said, “All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility. Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evil. Knowing eternity makes one comprehensive; comprehension makes one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility; nobility is like heaven. The heavenly is like Tao. Tao is Eternal. The decay of the body is not to be feared.” To even further that same idea, Kurzweil said, “Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.” Everything has a beginning and an end, people throughout history have sought out eternal life: Gulgamesh, Hitler, Indiana Jones, but isn’t the idea of life and our true purpose to live a full life, leave some type of legacy, then … die?
I have to be frank; I cannot ennoble death. Alan Harrington said it best: We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everyone. To live, to love, to create transcendent works of art, and then…. to be food for worms? Absolutely not acceptable. Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life… LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science … To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution’s secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.
Oh man, when I first read this interview with the Director of the Imaginary Foundation in Juxtapoz Magazine, it blew my mind. One thing specifically that stuck out was this quote, “Imagination is the factory that makes legends. It is the beginning of all achievement. To imagine is to perceive many potential futures, select the most delightful possibility, and then pull the present forward to meet it. Imagination has transported us from shivering in dark caves to triumphantly floating above our precious blue earth. It reminds us that reality is malleable and we are the architects of our own fate.” I am a firm believer in creating my own reality out of thought and the power of thought. Can you speak more on actualizing ideas from the mind and, the power of imagination, thought, and positive thinking … taking your dreams and making them a reality?
We live inside of condensations of our imagination said McKenna. He is right. The human world is the externalization of our imaginings; our thought shapes our spaces and our spaces return the favor, wrote Stephen Johnson. The man-made world is the externalization of the nervous system; it is our minds spilling over and concretized artifacts. I also love that Imaginary Foundation interview!
I just read this article in The New Yorker called “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” and a piece in the Economist called “Professor Facebook: More connective tissue may make academia more efficient.” The portion I quoted is from the Groupthink article, it says, “Jones’s explanation is that scientific advances have led to a situation where all the remaining problems are incredibly hard. Researchers are forced to become increasingly specialized, because there’s only so much information one mind can handle. And they have to collaborate, because the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersections of disciplines. ‘A hundred years ago, the Wright brothers could build an airplane all by themselves,’ Jones says. ‘Now Boeing needs hundreds of engineers just to design and produce the engines.’ The larger lesson is that the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone. But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?” I will pose that same question back to you. Is brainstorming useless? What is the best template for group creativity? Do you think academia is any more prone to ‘brainstorm’?
Wow, fascinating notion: We need to create spaces where disciplines and ideas can intersect: we know this. IDEAS HAVING SEX, which is akin to genetic recombination in nature. But then that New Yorker piece says, “brainstorming” doesn’t work. I think what he means is that brainstorming “in the traditional sense” is what doesn’t work: the planned, purposeful, forced interaction. I think “serendipitous collisions of ideas” are more like what happens at a coffee shop than a brainstorming meeting in an office. Stephen Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From is the best treatise on this.
You said, “People have always sort of been scared of new technologies. But in the end we assimilate them and they improve the quality of our lives.” In the film The Prestige, Nikola Tesla’s character said, “The truly extraordinary is not permitted in science and industry. Perhaps you’ll find more luck in your field, where people are happy to be mystified.” That being said I just bought Tesla’s autobiography My Inventions, and am very excited to read it. Tesla was basically ostracized for his ideas for ‘new technologies’ because people weren’t ready for his genius; I am sure there are so many technologies, cures, inventions that exist but have not been released to the public because of these fears. Can you explain your statement further, and the problem with people who are controlling the system suppressing these brilliant new ideas and technologies?
I read somewhere that Socrates used to fear the technology of ‘writing’ when it became en vogue. He said if we “wrote things down,” we wouldn’t remember anything and atrophy our brains. The point is that new technologies that promise to “change things” are always rejected and feared, but then quickly assimilated. Humans fear change, in spite of the fact that they create change. It’s funny.
In a piece you wrote called, On Creativity, Marijuana and “a Butterfly Effect in Thought” you quoted Pearl Buck who said, “The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive…by some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” Why do you think that people are not truly alive unless they are creating?
I’m fascinated by creativity. The creative drive as a sort of hypomania with high executive function makes a lot of sense to me: this balance between divine madness and functional being. I think people who’s heads are wired to create need to respond to this; they need an outlet to sort through the ways their synapses fire. Art is simply our way to communicate our ecstatic vision to others, but also to organize things so they make sense to us.
I am firm believer in ethics and guiding principles in life so I quote Freeman Dyson here in which he said, “The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.” This is a very tough question but, how do you think scientists and individuals even bring about this ‘conscious’ revolution without widening the gap and doing good for the entire world?
I think as we become post geographical beings and feel closer to people across the world more than ever before, our empathy is increasing at an exponential rate: we care about what happens to others, because we are more connected to them than ever before. Peter Diamandis’ new book Abundance explores how we can leverage emerging technologies to transcend all of our limitations. I recommend it.
