TED Community » Sophie Rand

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  A reply on Conversation: How does virtuality translate into reality?

  Apr 9 2012: your comment about chess got me thinking about human interaction and what 'virtual' things go on that may or may not effect the end result of an interaction. for example during a chess game, a player might try to read the intention of his opponent, like in poker, and perhaps their reading of their opponent comes from the facial expression of the opponent, which is influenced by what the opponent is thinking about. but the opponents thought is really only known by him, and of the many interpretations that can be made, only one of them will be the exact (or close to) truth of what the opponent actually was thinking. Same is true in all kinds of interactions, except with chess, it's harder to gauge how correct interpretations are. Those virtual emotions and virtual interpretations all somehow effect the end result
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  A comment on Talk: The cockroach beatbox

  Apr 3 2012: This discussion of whether the video is insensitive to the life of a cockroach is interesting- but the main point that I think is valuable was made by Kevin--something along the lines of 'what were the students thinking?' I don't think that this experiment should be written off because it uses live animals (Greg even said, they grow their legs back)-- but he could have added more about the fact that even though animals are of utility to science, they shouldn't be taken for granted. He also could have emphasized that the ice bath was to anesthetize so that the roach didn't feel anything and then react-- rather than that it was used so the roaches would 'chill out'
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  A reply on Conversation: What is the power behind a shared experience?

  Mar 27 2012: Love both of your responses! When you think about eating, its the most basic thing that every person needs to do-- you'd think that maybe that means it should be somethign done in private, like a lot of other basic activities....what do you think it is about eating that brings people together? I suspect it has something to do with hunger-- here I'm extending food hunger to the hunger for learning, because I agree with what Nicolette said earlier about learning being an essential shared experience. For some, learning is as essential and basic as eating is, and when we do learning or eating together, the consequences are enhanced because it was done together. It's clearer with learning-- learning with others naturally enhances your understanding of something, but I believe its true for eating too-- it's been shown that eating family meals can significantly improve health, so maybe the metaphor extends all the way through...
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  A reply on Conversation: How are different body parts connected to the emotions we traditionally associate with them?

  Mar 27 2012: your comment about palm reading makes me wonder: how much of what we might attribute to our bodies actually is something derived from something like human communication? I always suspected that people who are palm readers are just naturally good at judging character and reading people-- and that that is how they can stunningly tell you about yourself. In response to what you say about this being something like an inverse problem, i wonder (though doubt) if there is anything meaningful to study about the corresponding forward problem. By that I mean: have you ever had the physical sensation that you were upset or worried, but couldnt mentally put your finger on what it was? Meaning, can our physical emotions tell us something about our mental emotions?
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  A reply on Conversation: Will we ever truly be able to model nature?

  Mar 2 2012: I agree that we could get close to accuracy, but what would be the point? Getting near accuracy is good enough in most cases-- in engineering we make assumptions so often-- linearity, frictionless, causal...all these things which help us vastly to come up with solutions to natural problems, without needing to truly imitate those natural phenomena.
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  A reply on Conversation: Where does our identity as being "human" come from?

  Mar 2 2012: But what if you weren't able to communicate those characteristics? What if you had all the information of your family, yourself and your life, and your conscious brain was working, but you had an injury that meant you couldn't speak, or even indicate that you still are the same person?

• A comment on Conversation: What makes an idea spread? Duration? Quality? Loudness?

  Feb 25 2012: I think what makes an idea spread is ultimately quality: how 'true' it is, and also how timeless it is
  
  
  There are ideas that have been around forever--religion, love, friendship...That's why Shakespeare has always been (and I think will always be) popular-- his ideas never get old.
  
  In terms of how 'true' it is, even though I don't believe that anything can be proved to be absolutely true, there are things that everyone experiences, and the truth in something develops out of that. Ultimately I think an ideas' merit is what makes it propagate-- loudness doesnt matter-- in fact, loudness often goes ignored.

• A comment on Conversation: Would you rather be an information producer, propagator, or consumer?

  Feb 25 2012: I don't think there is always a fine line between being an information producer, propagator or consumer. I think that we are constantly propagating information without realizing it, simply through our daily communications with other people. When we produce information, I think it's impossible to share it without also reconsuming it-- because naturally the process spreading information requires reviewing it yourself.
  
  Teaching, which is a form of information producing and propagating, is necessarily learning teachers must understand a subject from so many aspects to be able to effectively teach to various learning styles.
  
  We are all information producers due to the internet-- for example google tracks all the moves we make, and our decisions on the internet to search things or look up things is a piece of information that is used to understand what people are looking at, interested in, likely to buy, etc..
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  A reply on Conversation: Can we ever know how another person "senses" the world?

  Feb 18 2012: weve hit on a really interesting and really different question.
  
  it seems that it boils down to questions of what we perceive, and how we know that weve perceived them-- consciousness enters into the equation when we see ourselves perceiving.
  ackk!!

• A reply on Conversation: Can we ever know how another person "senses" the world?

  Feb 18 2012: that may be true, but the question still stands-- does everyone perceive the reflected color from objects in the same way?