yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Jason Silva on Science, Adventure and Exploration | Brain Games


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] What does it mean to explore? What does it mean to adventure? Walker Percy wrote, "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something; not to be on to something is to be in despair.

The search, you see, is existential exploration. Science and adventure is how we search, not just for answers, but for better questions. It's how we rage against the darkness, how we battle against ignorance, make inroads against dogma. Exploration is how we map the world; science is how we come to understand it. Adventure is how we come alive. These are our tools against meaninglessness.

Adventure, science, and exploration put men on the Moon, built marvelous liners, immersed us in virtual realities, and helped us make sense of the world. Technological marvels extend our imaginative capacities and help us overcome all of our [Music] limits. As the poet Yeats wrote, "The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper," and growing and sharper they have through the scientific process.

We've expanded our minds by building instruments such as microscopes and telescopes that pierce the micro and the macro, engorging our perspectives. And in doing so, blasting new tunnels between the mind and the other, we satiate our curiosities by getting outside ourselves, beside ourselves, creating cognitive appendages and new toolkits for the mind, taking us to spaces and places beyond mind, world, and wonderment.

Adventure is about expanding our minds. The outer journey is the inner journey. We seek to expand the boundaries of our humanness, the repository of our knowledge, to become more than what we are. And as poet and author Marina Benjamin wrote, "What the space age has been seeking all along was not so much an expansion of physical space as an expansion of mind." When we dream of space, she wrote, "We dream of transcendence; we dream of what we might become." Oh [Music]

More Articles

View All
Is FIRE actually achievable? Can you retire early? (Financial Independence Retire Early)
Hey guys! Welcome back to the channel! In this video, we are going to be discussing one of my favorite topics to talk about, and that is, of course, financial independence and thus the ability to retire early. This is something that’s become a full-on tre…
Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman
We have to sit up straight. We have lower, since this is not right. Admiral Rickover would not stand for this. Um, okay. Uh, George, Nick, what are you working on? So we are building a multiplayer programming game for teaching people how to code. So lik…
2d curl intuition
Hello everyone! So I’m going to start talking about curl. Curl is one of those very cool vector calculus concepts, and you’ll be pretty happy that you’ve learned it once you have it, for no other reason than because it’s kind of artistically pleasing. Th…
The Most Gruesome Parasites – Neglected Tropical Diseases – NTDs
In the year 1014, Byzantine Emperor Basil the Second defeated the Bulgarian army and captured 15 thousand prisoners. He could’ve killed them, but he had a different idea. He wanted to weaken his opponents for decades to come. So he ordered that 99 out of …
15 Ways To Make People Like You
We’ve all met people who were kind of a pain to endure, and none of us wants to be that person, right? The person everyone rolls their eyes at. The person people avoid talking to for long, no matter the social setting. Though there are certain ways to pr…
Drake Versus Sharks | Wicked Tuna
What’s going on with our little anchor problem here? Maybe we sucked it in sometimes when the boat’s drifting around. The lines go underneath the boat, the rope floats around, and gets entangled in the propeller or the rudder. When that happens, you can’t…