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"The line between what it means to be dreaming and what it means to be awake is going to become very interesting," says Jordan Greenhall, CEO of Neurohacker. Virtual reality is perhaps the easiest way to conceive of that concept right now, but it's just one piece in a much larger body of accelerated technology on the horizon. Our sense of reality, how our self fits into our perception of the world, can be easily shaken through sensory input manipulation—and in very

low-tech and

low-quality ways. So image what a sophisticated approach will bring. VR and its relatives will be able to hack our mind in ways we will be helpless to resist—dream up an object and one day it might be 3D printed in quasi-real-time, straight from your imagination. Of course, there are enormous ethical implications. If we think social media encroaches on our lives now, we are not prepared for a future in which dreaming and waking look eerily similar. How will it change election campaigns, personal relationships, will you responsible for your own addictions and behaviors in this future? How will we establish the first rules of consent—hopefully not the hard way. VR will disrupt our very deepest construct: how we see and react to reality. If we are thoughtful about design and ethics, Greenhall hopes this radically upgrade our potential, rather than downgrade how we relate to one another.

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JORDAN GREENHALL

Jordan is now in his 17th year of building disruptive technology companies, and is the co-founder and CEO of Neurohacker Collective.

Early in his career, he helped start the online digital video revolution as co-founder and CEO of DivX. After somewhat successfully navigating two financial crises and an IPO (and going down in flames at Stage6), he left the helm at DivX to return his attention to the big picture. He tried his hand at capitalism – combining Angel investment at the sharp edge of the Schumpeter wave — with participation in a number of think tanks and institutes; most notably, the Aspen Institute and the Santa Fe Institute where he served on the Board of Trustees for five sweet years.

This exposure led him to the conclusion that humanity is in the midst of a world historical transition which will likely kill all of us (see Mad Max) but just might end in a truly amazing future (see Star Trek). Getting there is going to require many things of us – most notably a significant upgrade of our individual and collective capacity for thought and action.

Although he has long benefitted from entheogens, Jordan had not spent much time on nootropics or other Neurohacking techniques. After one week on an early NHC stack, he was convinced about the power and potential of this new technology and co-created Neurohacker Collective to bring it to the world.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jordan Greenhall: So now let's talk about virtual reality. We have this idea that one of the things that our media does, one of the things the way that we perceive the world does, is change the nature of how our psychology works. Our psychology is designed to be adaptive to our environment, and so if I change the way that we're interacting with the environment I change the psychology, and that has durable effects.

VR is kind of a big deal. It represents a radical increase in our capacity to modify the way that we perceive reality. It's highly immersive, it's multi-modal, so in principle it can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic—I mean we could layer other things potentially in, with electrical stimulation and olfactory if we want to—but the idea is that our conscious sense of self-identity, our position in the world, is actually a relatively loosely held construct.

There's been very good experiments on the way that you can actually cause someone’s sense of even where their body is in space to just go away and make them feel like they're 15 feet in front of where they actually are, because we're always doing our best job to integrate the total input of our sensory modalities to make a coherent gestalt of, 'Oh this is world, and this is self.' And what VR does is it provides enough fidelity of information and enough coherence of modality to jack or hack that underlying mechanism whereby we actually create our construct of self and world. That's a serious fucking thing.

If you think about the way a little kid interfaces with a film, a movie; for a little while they're ...

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