Jason Silva's "The Beginning of Infinity"

[Kookaburra]

Have any of you seen this?: The Beginning of Infinity

It's a rapid-fire description of reality as tunneling towards this point where we gain the conscious power & responsibility to manifest our imaginings in the real world. Worth checking out.

I intuitively feel a relation to DMT... not sure how exactly.

 

[Felnik]

its good i like it

 

[DoctorMantus]

It's Pretty interesting, thanks for the share.

I like how he had a Terence Mckenna quote in there.

 

[RebornInSmoke]

great vid, great talk, great graphics/art.

i wonder what software he used?
impressive

 

[vardlokkur]

I've liked watching his interviews. In one he's talking about "ideas having sex" and novelties being created more and more. The way I see it, is that science until recently has succeeded in dividing our awareness into a bunch of little, highly focused lenses. Now, it's starting to come back together; biochemistry blurs into micro-biology blurs into nanotechnology blurs into etc, etc.

It is really uplifting to think of, but I think Silva and others on this train of thought (Ray Kurzweil for one) are almost too ambitious. Programming and processing do seem to be getting exponentially more powerful, but there's still so much we don't understand. I think some of the ambitions they present, such as extending human life are still beyond us. We're really an infant species, and most of us can barely navigate our own minds with any real skill. It's going to be scary if they are right, for the majority of people in my opinion. While we are able to make all these cool devices, it takes thousands of humans working in unison to develop the new IPod. And what about all the third-world factory workers caught in the gears of this ever-expanding machine? And the nations who have their resources of gold and silver robbed from them so we can make these machines. Also, the majority of people that use these new technologies barely understand them, making us ever more dependent on the "machine" in general.

He also gets really superlative when he mentions the topography of Manhattan trumping "geology". I think the BP Oil Spill and Fukushima Reactor allude to our overall ingenuity. We haven't learned to build things that can stand amongst chaos, and the universe is far more chaotic than it is ordered. It's structure is ordered, but it's proceedings are chaotic.

 

[Kookaburra]

I've liked watching his interviews. In one he's talking about "ideas having sex" and novelties being created more and more. The way I see it, is that science until recently has succeeded in dividing our awareness into a bunch of little, highly focused lenses. Now, it's starting to come back together; biochemistry blurs into micro-biology blurs into nanotechnology blurs into etc, etc.

It is really uplifting to think of, but I think Silva and others on this train of thought (Ray Kurzweil for one) are almost too ambitious. Programming and processing do seem to be getting exponentially more powerful, but there's still so much we don't understand. I think some of the ambitions they present, such as extending human life are still beyond us. We're really an infant species, and most of us can barely navigate our own minds with any real skill. It's going to be scary if they are right, for the majority of people in my opinion.

I like that he doesn't claim to know what's going to happen. I think the idea is more along the lines of what Terence McKenna says, about how we can only get as far as our ideas & our language, & we need to put our best metaphors on the table. That we might as well dream big & think about what could happen.

http://www.youtube.com/tedaws?x=us_showcasephase2_8394_27

 

[vardlokkur]

I used to have this fiction I was working on, based on the possibility that some sort of "smart" nano-bot would basically alter everything on the planet, being effected by the noospheric consciousness, and taking in account ever individual subconscious simultaneously. Basically making a world populated by physically real egregores, archetypes, and mythological atavisms. I ended up just making it into a long poem since the vastness of possibilities was too much for me to describe with the type of syntax I was aiming for without giving it exhaustive attention.

That's my take on the singularity in it's most instantaneous form. But I don't think the human ego would survive something like that. Though perhaps all the "products" would share some type of common memory of the Earth's past. My mind's an ever raging battle between an unsatisfiable skeptic and an incorruptible idealist :?