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[MUSIC PLAYING]
You know, I love this idea of radical openness,
the free exchange of information,
the free flow of ideas, creating spaces in which ideas can have
sex, as Matt Ridley talks about.
And this is huge because it turns out that ideas are just
as real as the neurons they inhabit,
as James Gleick tells us.
A new kingdom rises above the biosphere.
Denizens of this kingdom are ideas,
because ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,
it turns out.
They leap from brain to brain.
They compete for the limited resources of our attention.
They have infectivity.
They have spreading power.
They are, what Richard Dawkins calls,
the new replicators, born from the primordial soup
of human culture.
Their vector of transmission is language
and electronic communication.
And though ideas are made of nucleic acid,
they have achieved more evolutionary change
and at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
You know, Ray Kurzweil says our ability
to create virtual models in our heads,
combined with our modest-looking thumbs,
was sufficient to usher in the secondary force of evolution
called technology.
And it will continue, until the entire universe
is at our fingertips.
This is unbelievable stuff.
It speaks to the telescopic nature of evolutionary change,
more change in the last 100 years
than in the last billion years.
Terrance McKenna actually wrote, "from the moment
that human beings invented language,
biological evolution essentially ceased,
and evolution became a cultural epigenetic phenomenon."
Now, we take in matter of low organization,
we put it through our mental filters,
and we extrude it in the form of space shuttles and iPhones.
You know, the imaginary foundation
tells us that what imagination does
is it allows us to conceive of delightful future
possibilities, pick the most amazing one,
and pull the present forward to meet it.
Imagine how impoverished this world
would have been, if we hadn't invented
the technology of the oil painting in time for Van Gogh,
or the technology of the musical instrument in time
for Beethoven and Mozart to unfurl through it.
With the revolutions in biotechnology
and nanotechnology, the free exchange of information
is allowing us to conceive of radical new things.
Freeman Dyson says, in the future,
a new generation of artists will be writing genomes
with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses.
"What is great in man," said Nietzsche,
"is that he is a bridge and not an end."
"We're on a trajectory smack in the middle between born
and and the made," wrote Kevin Kelly.
And so radical openness, it's huge.
It's a universe of possibility.
It's gray infused by color.
It's the invisible revealed.
It's the mundane blown away by awe.
We need to cultivate radical openness
as a way of participating and accelerating evolution.
Wow.
[MUSIC PLAYING]