Higher Fidelity Love: Jason Silva Talks Dating, The Future Of Sex, Romance And Intersubjectivity

It's Valentine's Day, which means we're talking about love. Not only love in regards to personal relationships, but also the future of love. There are dating apps that have made communication easier, smartphones have changed how we interact with other people. Calling someone may seem like a bigger step in a relationship than sleeping over. It's different, but that doesn't necessarily make love in the digital age any worse.

Jason Silva, host of "Brain Games" on National Geographic Channel and the "Shots of Awe" YouTube series, believes we should all be trying to fall in love and the future of dating and intimacy is a bright one.

Talking to Silva, the one thought he keeps going back to, is this idea of intersubjectivity. The term, in a nutshell, is used to explain the psychological relationship, or connection, between people. "The desire for intimacy is the desire for the intersubjective space. The notion of a shared we, of a shared space when the I becomes the we and you become a part of her and she becomes a part of you. You guys share this cosmology of two shaped like a heart," Silva says.

In many ways we feel the most connected with another person during the most intimate moment, which happens right after sex. "The intersubjective is the way you feel post-coital, when you are at the absolute closest with your lover, that radical kind of empathy. And what is that, but an attempt, or desire, for telepathy, for mind-to-mind communication, where we can share our inner self with another? We have crude tools now, we have language, art but love making is the best way to experience that kind of romance and I think the future will be higher-fidelity technology, deeper ways to commune with the other," Silva predicts.

It's unlikely that we, as people, will ever stop feeling that sense of desire for another person. Love is natural, he says, and romance will never go away, but it could change.

Technology is changing things. Just think of how people are talking about Tinder. That may seem like a bad thing, but Silva argues that it could be a very good thing. "Who’s to say text messages don’t have their own vernacular, their own kind of intersubjective intimacy? Who’s to say Facetime doesn’t create new modalities of expression?" Silva said. "I think we shouldn’t make a judgment that humans have less of a desire for connection just because they’re doing it through screens. The desire for connection persists and innovates and finds new ways whether it’s emoticons or other creative ways to communicate what we want to communicate.

"I think if you ask most teenagers if they think text messages are not intimate they would say you’re crazy," Silva added. He uses cinema as an example to experience the idea of an intersubjective space because we can lose ourselves in movies.

"It’s like the movie 'Inception' - the metaphor for the hacking of dreams was really about cinema. The director creates the dream, he pulls the audience into that dream and we fill it with our subconscious," Silva said. Much like love, you're entering a subjective world and creating something new together.

Technology could, in some ways, lead to new and more exciting things because they could remove barriers in a relationship. Time and distance are less of a concern because it's a lot easier to communicate with the person we love. In the future, new technology could make it so that we are sharing the most intimate space with that special person. We already spend time wondering how another person thinks or feels, but what if technology could let us actually experience that? Ray Kurzweil discussed that notion in his book "The Singularity Is Near," and advancentments in Artificial Intelligence could make for an interesting future.

"I think, in the next 10 years our AIs, our Siris, so to speak, will be sophisticated enough to feel and talk like people. And I think, at that point, we'll start falling in love with them," Silva said.

Looking at the future of love, Silva's advice is to fall in love completely, or die trying.