TED Community » Michael Roland

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Spirituality, Consciousness, Using my skills to help people, Tai Chi, Qigong,

An idea worth spreading

Love is undying. Love is unrelenting. Love is the ocean. Love is the sky. Love is Heaven. Love is Earth. Love is.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +1.20 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Talk: Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness

  Jan 5 2012: Ron Murphy : "The real route to knowledge is experience, through the senses. We are experiential beings."
  Meditation is both experiential and sensational, more so at the beginning or lower stages of development.
  
  David Galiel: "It is remarkable how predictably, whenever the scientific method is applied to test irrational beliefs in a new area of "common wisdom", believers throw up the same futile objections...Railing against it may be emotionally satisfying, but it is ultimately as futile, and unproductive, as spitting into the wind."
  
  Emotional satisfaction is equally irrelevant to the scientist as it is to the meditater.
  
  However, those who choose attach themselves to a belief whether it is belief in a theory, belief in science as the ultimate arbitrator or belief in a fundamentalist religion as the only truth are prone to be emotional in defense of there beliefs and especially emotional when they feel someone is putting forth an argument that goes against their beliefs.
  
  I can't ell from your post if you were responding to my comment or not, but as it is under my original offering I have to suppose it is. I was merely making a comment from a particular perspective, that of my own experience in meditation and in working in the academic and research environment. I was neither railing nor expressing a "belief."

• A comment on Conversation: Is neural activity truly the basis for thoughts, feelings, and perceptions?

  Jan 2 2012: Yes, I was not intending to open a debate. Just curious about his position. Thank you for your answer.

• A comment on Talk: Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome

  Dec 30 2011: Lovely talk! Fun, interesting, educational. I am the grateful recipient of a new and profound concept, the connectome. Thank you! The multimedia presentations were very well done and helped elucidate the idea wonderfully well. I am very much looking forward to new research in this area. I'm sure the time will come when it is directly applied with fantastic results.
  
  Am I more than my connectome?. Yes, but still this is very exciting work. Thank you!
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness

  Dec 30 2011: I love the fact that he acknowledges that animals have an autobiographical consciousness and that he has compassion for those who might benefit from his and others work in consciousness. However, I think he is mostly wrong in his premises.
  
  For example:
  1) Mind is a flow of mental images
  2) Sense of Self
  
  Anyone who has done extensive meditative practice, (arguably the very people who have the most direct experience of consciousness) has been able to cease the flow of images, thoughts, ideas, sounds, etc.. Yet, with this cessation of the flow of mental images, they have hardly become unconscious. In fact, quite the contrary. The same is true, at a much higher level of meditation, for the sense of self. The loss of self does not equate to loss of consciousness.
  
  I hope that Dr. Damasio's work leads to something that will directly help people, which would make it extremely worthwhile. But, in terms of the state of consciousness research the land of academia, it is very much like watching blind men grope an elephant...It's a snake, no it's a tree, no it's a rope. In fact, while I understand the preoccupation with studying the brain as the source of consciousness, in the end, I believe we will find that even that premise is incorrect.

• A comment on Talk: Annie Murphy Paul: What we learn before we're born

  Dec 29 2011: Lovely. Can't wait until we start to understand what we learned before we were conceived!
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Richard Dawkins: Why the universe seems so strange

  Dec 29 2011: "Matter is useful fiction."
  
  "Whatever you are, you are not the stuff from which you are made."
  
  "Could we by training and practice emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as mathematical understanding of the very small and very large?"
  
  Science is catching up with what transcendent thinkers have always known. I can introduce you to any number of Buddhist monks, some of whom are educated, some not, who would look at the above quotes from this talk and say, "Yes, Yes, and yes."
  
  I applaud RD and other minds that are endeavoring to quantify the queer universe that many tens of thousands of other minds have already recognized in quality through direct experience.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Richard Dawkins: Militant atheism

  Dec 29 2011: RD: I am angry about something that other people believe, because it's wrong. If you are smart, like me, you should join me in my anger. If you have money, unlike me, you should spend it on proving my anger is justified and they are wrong and we are right. If you don't want to spend your money, at least be righteously militant in your opinion.
  
  ME: Wow! You sound a bit like a religious fanatic.
  
  RD: No I am an atheist.
  
  ME: Oh, never mind.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

  Dec 29 2011: "People wrap themselves in their beliefs so tight that not even the truth will set them free." Michael Specter
  
  Brilliant.