TED Community » Chris Pitcher

More About Me

I'm passionate about

The appalling state of mainstream journalism in the UK, particularly for science and health. Ditto the UK general public. Animal rights (I think they should have some).

An idea worth spreading

The meaning of a word is what it does. When anyone hears or sees a word it stirs up activity in their brain. That activity is the meaning of the word. It may be different for different people. Some people may clearly have outlier responses to some words. But however you look at it, the only meaningful way that a word exists as a meaning is in the brain activity it arouses. This works for sentences too. I think we accept that Plato's ideals are an outdated way of looking at things. But for things like "This sentence is false", forget all the semantic philosophy. It means what it does. Which is this; it appears to make sense until we study it, then it doesn't. That is what it means. The brain activity it creates is the only meaning it has.

Talk to me about

How can science explain consciousness? I just can't even get started with it. The most appealing idea is that consciousness is an illusion. But surely consciousness is that which sees the illusion!

Comments

• TEDCred score: +23.80 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A reply on Talk: John Hodgman: Design, explained.

  Jun 10 2012: " I also think that it is very inappropriate to mock people with a different view (such as ancient aliens theorists)"
  
  To correct you. Alien Theorists not only deserve mockery but actually are deserving of corporal punishment.
• +5

  A comment on Talk: Regina Dugan: From mach-20 glider to humming bird drone

  Mar 29 2012: Unbearable
  
  Had to give in after 2:07

• A comment on Talk: Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career

  Mar 14 2012: I got fed up with talk and didn't finish it largely because it flies in the face of my personal experience and that of most people I know. We have all had good careers, mostly engineering and software, and we use the easy money from that to fund our passions, music, rock climbing, skiing, mountain biking, real ale, or even - shock horror - having a family.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Questions no one knows the answers to

  Mar 14 2012: Earlier in my life I always thought that on the balance of probabilities, there must be other life out there and plenty of it intelligent. But I now think this may be to underestimate the power of the anthropic principal. And in terms of the Drake equation, the chances of simple life arising at all and the subsequent move from RNA to RNA plus DNA may be much closer to zero than people like to think.
  
  These days I wonder if we are in the situation of winning the lottery every week for a year, and then looking around for other similar winners.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: John Lloyd inventories the invisible

  Dec 17 2011: This is equivocation.
  
  His statement proposes that that we don't have artificial intelligence ie none of the AI we have is actually intelligent. By that measure we don't have artificial stupidity either.

• A reply on Talk: John Lloyd inventories the invisible

  Dec 17 2011: Yes, Krishna is the answer.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: David Damberger: What happens when an NGO admits failure

  Dec 17 2011: I think the problem is that if a place doesn't have running water it probably doesn't have a plumbing supplies store either.

• A reply on Talk: Martin Hanczyc: The line between life and not-life

  Dec 9 2011: What ever the culture, God is basically a belief in magic i.e. doing the impossible. Without that aspect, God just becomes part of science.
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Martin Hanczyc: The line between life and not-life

  Dec 9 2011: "Life" turns out to be another creation of the human mind, just like beauty or morality. The extremes are easy to agree on but in the middle ground we can only go by if we feel something is living / beautiful / moral. We then go about reverse engineering our feelings to look for rules.
  
  In fact the distinction is arbitrary and essentially emotional, not scientific.
  
  Although I have no evidence, I would suggest that we respond to a notion of life based on evolutionary pressure to restrict our diet to organic material.

• A reply on Talk: Martin Hanczyc: The line between life and not-life

  Dec 9 2011: Actually, "life" turns out to be another creation of the human mind, just like beauty or morality. The extremes are easy to agree on but in the middle ground we can only go by if we feel something is living / beautiful / moral. We then go about reverse engineering our feelings to look for rules.
  
  In fact the distinction is arbitrary and essentially emotional, not scientific.
  
  Although I have no evidence, I would suggest that we respond to a notion of life based on evolutionary pressure to restrict our diet to organic material.