Given our interest in Big Data, we were excited to see the latest project, The Mirroring Mind, from theCube alum, Jason Silva.  The filmaker is one of our genereation’s best messengers telling the promise of Big Data as it pertains specifically to the individual, proving its case in the enterprise and moving its way down to the consumer.  In Silva’s most recent film short, he explores the mind-blowing potential of data’s ability to improve our self-awareness.  That’s powerful stuff, as servers create a global network of synapsis, all able to learn from each other and teach us more about our culture, economy and behavior than we ever imagined.

But before we delve into the mind-altering film short, let’s clarify one thing:

Since the movie Inception came out, people kept referring to “a dream within a dream” as inception.  Hence the title.  But that occurrence is actually referred to as a false awakening, and inception means the beginning.  Just wanted to clear things up before proceeding.

Now back to the mighty brain and its propensity for self-awareness through data’s feedback loop.

The brain is an organ that allows us to function every day.  Without it, one cannot eat, breathe or talk, and other bodily functions we usually take for granted wouldn’t be possible.  A minor glitch in our brain, say a clot blocking the neural pathways, could simply result in paralysis.  So in many ways, when we study the brain, we actually study ourselves.

The Mirroring Mind deals with consciousness, self-awareness, Strange Loops of Self Reference, and recursion. Silva is “a futurist, filmmaker, epiphany addict, ecstatic truth lover, techno optimist,” or in simple terms, he’s a person you talk to when you want to be mindf*cked.

The passage of self-mirroring

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The idea for the short film was inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid specifically the passage about self-mirroring.

THE MIRRORING MIND – by @JasonSilva from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

In a recent interview with SingularityHub, it was brought to Silva’s attention that in the future, should people be able to create consciousness within a machine, how will people know that the machine is actually conscious and not programmed to think that it is?

“[Y]ou’re talking about when a machine passes the Turing Test, and it tells us that it’s conscious—how will we believe it? Well, I think Ray Kurzweil’s answer is best. He says, at some point the AI’s answers will be so perfect, so nuanced, its interactions with us and its adaptation to us will be so smooth and indistinguishable from talking to a real person, that we’ll just have to take that leap of faith.

“And Kurzweil says we do that every day with each other. Like I have to take a leap of faith you are a person, and that I’m not in some virtual Matrix-like environment talking to Mr. Smith right now. You could be a very convincing digital robot that’s programmed by the Matrix to feed this into my lucid dream right now. But at some point I just have to take that leap of faith—I think it’ll be the same thing,” Silva answered.

Turning the brain inside-out

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The Human Brain Project was also touched in the interview and Silva is quite excited about Europe’s flagship project.  The European Commission is backing the project with a million euros and even in the US, studying the brain is a huge deal with President Barack Obama spending $3 billion to map the human brain.

“It’ll be the ultimate manifestation of us turning ourselves inside out. It’ll be the universe folding in on itself completely. Once the brain understands the brain 100%—who knows what happens! Like what Erik Davis calls the “mystic-psychotic collapse” where baseline reality dissolves. That’s why I ended my video with that line. I think it’ll be the ultimate surprise and delight and astonishment,” Silva stated.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE CEO and founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante during the IBM Information on Demand at theCube, Silva stated that  the divide between user and tool disappears as computers rapidly develop.  This statement just fortifies the talk of a conscious machine in the future.  Silva also discussed self-quantified contributions towards human evolution, the context Big Data provides for human nature in the 21st century and much, much more.

To catch Silva’s interview at theCube, see below.