TED Community » Pedro Contró

More About Me

I'm passionate about

understanding my world and my place in the world.

An idea worth spreading

In a world full of selfishness, ignorance, attachment and anger, we should strive to be the change that we want to see in the world around us. This change must come from an understanding of the world trough the study and reflexion upon physics, biology, economy and history. Then, we need also an understanding about ourselves trough the study and reflexion of psychology, philosophy, art and religion. Then, we need to form a global and coherent view of the world and ourselves trough much study and reflexion of all these subjects. Finally, whatever comes from this understanding must be put into action for our personal benefit and that of others.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +14.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Talk: Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything

  Apr 29 2010: The most important problem in Wolfram's research program is that algorithms cannot change their predesigned categorization ontology when exposed to a new situation. This capability is completely natural to us humans though, but we do not have the slightest idea of how we do it (see Dreyfus, 1979). It is actually, what we call "common sense", and is the ability to know how to respond in a given situation lacking explicit rules.
  Wolfram should read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. There it is proved with all logical rigor that in order to claim that any statement of the world can be captured under atomic proposions and hence be syntactically computable, you need to have as a premise that logic is a transcendental structure of the world. Having that as a premise, it is therefore impossible for logic to refer formally to itsef (i.e. prove that logic is logical). There is therefore always an implicit domain which lies outside the limits of formal language, and hence is not computable.

• A reply on Talk: Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything

  Apr 29 2010: Hello Michael and Wolfgang,
  
  You might be interested reading Henri Bergson's "The Creative Evolution", where he gives a very precise and extended argument for the necessity and even primacy of intuition within the process of human understanding. The book is a philosophical classic that in my opinion provides a very important argument against a mechanistic science.
• +3

  A reply on Talk: Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

  Mar 22 2010: That was probably the weakeast point in Harris' presentation. Although he admitted that factual moral testing should include collective well-being measurements, he didn't spent so much time explaining how to do that.
  I think that the first argument to convince someone of moral factual research is indeed based on neuroscience. Nevertheless, as it is the case with cognitive science, an interdisciplinary dialogue between mathematics, biology, neuroscience, psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy is essential. In the same manner, we should think that a moral science should be based on an interdisciplinary dialogue.
  Personally, I think complex systems and self-organisation provide fantastic general frameworks to understand how the intergration between the different aspects of well being (biological, neurobiological, psychological, economical, social, etc.) can be properly understood.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish

  Mar 16 2010: "When people say to me : 'But how are you going to feed the world?' I reckon I don't love the question... And I don't love it precisely because it is stated implicitely within the traditional framework of agriculture" (quoting more or less..)
  
  What was fantastic about Dan Barber's talk was exactly that it compeled us to think out of the linear model..! What is great about the Veta la Palma's system is precisely all the summed benefits, besides the fish production! A new system of agriculture in which the ecosystem becomes healthier in addition to production, creates outer benefits to the system that DO NOT SCALE LINEARLY! Thus creating better opportunities for other systems of agriculture to operate optimally.
  
  May we get out of the box of the linear scalability model!
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf: Lose your ego, find your compassion

  Nov 13 2009: One day I heard from a Buddhist monk: "If two philosophers agree, then one of them is not a philosopher. If two saints do not agree, then one of them is not a saint".
  
  Even though we all strive for the absolute, there is not an absolute path to reach the absolute. Nevertheless, I believe that all paths to the absolute involve primary an inner quest of wisdom and compassion.
  
  It seems of the utmost importance for spiritual people in this world to study and understand the different virtues and pitfalls of all main religions. We urgently need to find global principles underlying these religions in order to form a new global ethics.
  
  I would like to express my deepest gratitude for putting this material online, which I believe constitutes a great advancement fulfilling this aim.

• A comment on Talk: Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors

  Oct 23 2009: Wow! What an extraordinary talk!
  Thank you very much Mr. Talgam for such an inspirational account of leadership.
  Personally, it was fascinating to see the extent to which the ideas in this talk find so strong resonance within the General Systems Theory and Synergetics, theories that try to explain how emergent phenomena arise and are maintained.
• +4

  A comment on Talk: Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war

  May 6 2009: It's a pity that Mr. Gourley didn't mention one crucial word: self-organisation.
  Indeed, in the study of complex systems, we have recently beginning to suspect that behind any power-law distribution (the distributions Mr. Gourley found in frequency of killing vs. number of people killed) there is always self-organisation.
  Power-law distributions actually arise in an enormous variety of phenomena: distribution of wealth (Pareto laws), distribution of words used in any text (Zipf law), distribution of earthquakes intensities, and distribution of scale-free networks (like the Internet).
  The value of alpha is not the central issue to understand the system (it only gives a description of the particular distribution). What is more interesting is to study what H. Haken called "the order parameters", which can actually be calculated from a model of the local interactions, and give us the possibility to make predictions about the evolution of the distribution.