What's Wrong with TED Talks

~I, and many people, think it's way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED.

~My TED talk is not about my work or my new book – the usual spiel – but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work.

The first reason is over-simplification.

~Let me tell you a story. I was at a presentation that a friend, an astrophysicist, gave to a potential donor. I thought the presentation was lucid and compelling (and I'm a professor of visual arts here at UC San Diego so at the end of the day, I know really nothing about astrophysics). After the talk the sponsor said to him, "you know what, I'm gonna pass because I just don't feel inspired ...you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell."

At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine?

I'm Away

Click on the dice, upper right, for a random read until I get back.

Dennett on Breaking the Spell

Daniel Dennett says there isn't anything spiritual about religion that science cannot explain. Forget about religion as being hands-off for scientists. Prayer, the need for God, belief in an afterlife, religious faith: science says it can explain them all very well, thank you.

My Materialism is Bigger than Your Consciousness

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." (Max Planck, who originated the quantum revolution.)

Philip Kapleau Left the Rat Race Behind

In 1953, at age 46, Philip Kapleau was a New York businessman making good money but tired of the rat race. There had to be an answer to it all and peace, he thought, so he decided to go to Japan to study Zen but, about to embark, his friends warned him he was making a huge mistake. He began to think so himself. His journal entries recorded his thoughts.

Turtles All the Way Down: "Nothing" Is the Most Important Question in the World

Why does this blog article exist? Because its author poured himself a cup of coffee the other morning and sat down in front of the computer to read a book review. Where did the book review come from? From the reviewer who wrote it, silly. Where did the book come from? Its author wrote it. This is becoming tedious.

Okay, how about this?

John Wren-Lewis' Endarkenment

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of everywhere into here. (Children's nursery rhyme)

As a professor and humanist psychologist, John Wren-Lewis was in the forefront of a 1960s Death of God movement before his experience. He saw mysticism as "an escape into fantasy" and a shirking of "creative struggle." He was a "skeptic about all things mystical," and "saw mysticism as a ' failure of nerve'." Then something happened.

American Amnesiac Michael Boatwright Wakes Up Speaking Swedish

What if some morning you wake up in a motel room and don't know who you are?  You don't know how to access your bank accounts to survive. You don't know if you have a job. You don't know if you have a wife. If so, what is her name? The names of your children? What is your country?  You look in the mirror and don't recognize yourself. You talk in a language  not your native tongue.

Gettysburg 4th of July 1913 Reunion Between Yankees & Rebels

100 years ago today. We are creatures of time and time is a kind of amnesia. Most of what falls into the past is lost to us while that which is recalled becomes filtered through the present. Baz Luhrmann's 2013 movie The Great Gatsby is an example. With its modern-music sound track the film seeks to please modern sensibilities rather than lead viewers into how the world was seen then. For some, TV commercials and movie stars are the way the world is, without question, without doubt. Yet we are descended from ancestors whose stories and lives are unknown to us--from 1861 to 1865 mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, lost over 700,000 loved ones in the American Civil War.  Their world was fragile, not to be trusted.  It is a war that defined the United States of America and today its citizens go about their daily business without knowing whence they came.

Meditation, Neuroplasticity, & Happy-Wiring the Brain

All at once the roshi, the room, every single thing disappeared in a dazzling stream of illumination and I felt myself bathed in a delicious, unspeakable delight. . . . For a fleeting eternity I was alone--I alone was.