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
Howard Marks: The “Easy Times” are Over for the Stock Market
If it’s the change I think it is, then what you should have in your portfolio going forward can be very different from what it has been. Billionaire investor Howard Marx is warning that the easy times in the stock market are likely over. In a recent inter…
Composing 3x3 matrices | Matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy
So, we have two three by three matrices here: matrix A and matrix B. We could, of course, view each of them as a transformation in three-dimensional space. Now, what we’re going to think about in this video is the composition of A and B. So, you could th…
Why does your vote matter? | US government and civics | Khan Academy
Why does your vote matter? Your vote matters because, uh, in the most specific case, there might be a race where you live for the House or the Senate, or even the presidency, where your vote really could determine who the winner of that race is. We saw i…
Hiking Table Mountain, Alberta - 360 | National Geographic
Table Mountain gets its name from this really cool large flat tablelike plateau which exists just below the summit. When I’m setting out on a trail, I’m always really excited to see what I’ll discover along the way. I’m looking out for small details that…
Snowflake Science to Study Avalanches | Explorer
Snowflakes are one of mother nature’s most exquisite creations—fragile snow crystals that dazzle us in an array of shapes and sizes. But there’s a lot more to these intricate ice formations than meets the eye. Turns out that by looking a lot closer, snowf…
Inflation Just Hit a 13-Year High and Investors Are Worried
So in the past week, the Federal Reserve has had their little meeting and decided to keep interest rates exactly where they are until their next meeting. So for those that don’t know, the Fed meets eight times per year to discuss monetary policy. With in…