First there was Justin-Hall Tipping (a journalist by profession) talking about how we should take energy off the grid. If his dramatic self-assured tone isn't enough to tell you that something is fishy, let me enlighten you about the current state of power generation: the bottleneck we have now is in the energy storage sector, if we can build efficient long-term energy storage devices, solar-wind and all the eco-friendly power generating sectors will take over all the thermal power plants. Justin-Hall does show us a "new" technique of energy storage that traps single electrons, but he doesn't go into the details of how efficient, stable or practical those devices are in storing bulk quantities of energy for prolonged periods of time.
Then there was Bunker Roy. I'm not going to even waste my time on the epic failness of TED in letting this man talk. It's kind of like a bad x-files episode catered to an audience that has a I-desperatly-want-to-believe syndrome. Just look at his wikipedia page for the controversy behind him.
The latest addition is a neuroscientist who claims our brains are meant for motor control. To give him credit he is far better than Justin-Hall or Bunker Roy; he's done some amazing research and his argument that brains are meant for motor control is in good taste. But he doesn't defend it properly. He doesn't address the problem of organisms that achieve perfect motor control without the help of brains. Hell, even single-celled creatures without a nervous system (or a single neuron) achieve motion without difficulty. Evolutionary psychology has a great amount of literature on to how and why brains evolved in living things. Why doens't he even bother to cite them?
At the end of the talk he answers Chris's question of "whether falling in love or dreaming is an accident?" by saying that even vision should be understood by movement [ie motor control]. Oh the horror. Let's assume for a moment that animal brains were evolved for complex motor control. But humans have evolved way futher since. As hypothesised and defended by Antonio Damassio, the author of Self Comes to Mind
, our brains create three distinct selfs
1.) The Core Self - a neural map of our physical structure
2.) The Protoself - a relational map of the Core Self with external objects
3.) The Autobiographical Self - a narrative that stiches together collections of Protoselfs that is responsible for constructing morality
Obviously, our speaker is only aware of the Core Self and the protoself, and not the autobiographical self. In doing so he misses the very notion of what it means to be an intelligent life form in this Universe. He misses why we create complex societies with justice systems, economics, politics, science and culture.
Shame on you TED for not creating a proper dialogue after the talk and shame on you Daniel Wolpert for not doing your literature survey properly and taking us for ignorant fools.
