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JASON SILVA: You know, there's a great line by Carl Sagan that
says that understanding is a kind of ecstasy,
that we are cognitive beings, we are creatures of mind.
We have natural inquiry embedded in our bones.
Curiosity defines us.
We are the frontal lobes of the universe.
But it's also said that in life, happiness
comes not from finding the answers but in seeking
better questions.
And so in the age of the internet, where
any query, where any piece of data, knowledge, or insight
is a Google search away, you come to wonder,
are we living in a world where wonder is expressed more
intensely, because any time I wonder about something,
I can look up the answer?
Or is the immediacy with which the answer is available
actually dulling us into a state where we rarely
experience the rapture of discovery,
the rapture of the search?
Not just the destination, but the journey expressed
as the labor, the search, the curiosity
seeking to satiate itself.
And so it makes you wonder, will this simply
open up new vistas, new questions
we haven't thought of yet?
Are we offloading the simple questions to the noosphere
and making room for new things we haven't even thought of yet?
I mean, I like to think so, because I am an optimist.
Unlike Socrates, who felt that the invention of writing
would atrophy our brains because we wouldn't have to remember
anything if we wrote it down, so, too, people
worry that today's technologies are
going to atrophy part of our brain
and limit what it means to be human.
But I think it won't.
I think it will literally offload some functionality
and open up new vistas, just like every technology that
came before.
So that's what I think.
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