TED Community » Eric Lawton

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Philosophy, music, gardening, science, politics

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• A reply on Conversation: Where do our thoughts come from?

  Mar 4 2011: Doris Lessing explored this a good deal in "The Four-Gated City"; I saw a lot of truth in what she had to say, though I take "vibration" as a metaphor.

• A comment on Conversation: Where do our thoughts come from?

  Mar 4 2011: From TED conversations of course.
  More seriously, from conversations in the wider sense, including those long-distance conversations we call books, art, movies, songs. Yes, perhaps from our subconscious, but our subconscious is working with what came in through our senses.
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  A comment on Conversation: Should Governments start to measure what really matters to people - their happiness? Or should they stay out of such a private matter?

  Feb 23 2011: I was looking at a news feed yesterday which was about Texas voting on permitting handguns on university campuses.
  There was an accompanying advertisement with a picture of a battlefield with one soldier applying a white patch and the slogan "Stop severe bleeding fast - saves lives" (sorry, I'm not going to give them another ad).
  Gross Domestic Product would be improved by the gun sale, the ammo, and the anti-coagulant. Even "better" would be if the anti-coagulant didn't work and a funeral was necessary. Surely we can devise a measure which better reflects how well a nation is doing than the GDP. And as others have pointed out in this thread, the U.S. constitution guarantees "pursuit of happiness" so how do we know how well they are doing in enabling this if there is no measure of success? I know it was pointed out that it is only the right to engage in the pursuit, not the achievement, but we can leave it to the citizen to do the pursuing and take the average achievement as being a proxy measure for the success of enabling of the pursuit which is the government's constitutionally required job. It would certainly be a better measure than GDP.

• A comment on Conversation: A scientifically proveable Purpose to Human Life?

  Feb 22 2011: I'm having difficulty in understanding "purpose". My dictionary links it closely to "intention". So the purpose of a watch may be to tell the time, but you need somebody to own the purpose. So my purpose for the one on my wrist is to tell the time, but for the old, no-longer-functioning one in the drawer, it may be to remind me of my grandfather who used to own it.
  So as a being with intentions, I can have purposes for my life, but I don't see how there can be "a purpose to human life" unless some being intends that purpose. The advantage of a deity in this type of discussion is that it provides the being. However, we could be more abstract and acknowledge that we can treat evolution as if it designed us, even without imputing conscious intention. In that case, your question could be rephrased as "what are we well-designed to do". In this sense, I would agree that as we are "designed" (whether you think it is a god or evolution that did the design work) to be intelligent social animals that one of our purposes would be to go beyond mere reproduction and be useful, creative members of a community and one of those uses would be to teach our children what they need to know. However, we can't limit it to just that, as we also have our own purposes which we can create for ourselves, and what there is also we owe to the rest of our community (however widely defined), and in this sense an abstraction of that community is the being which has the purpose.
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  A comment on Conversation: What are your three best tips on how to lead a fulfilling life?

  Feb 21 2011: Talk to people and, more importantly, listen to them. We are social animals. Jane Chin's number one of spending time with important people in your life is excellent, but we need to find new important people as well.
  Syd Nash's number one is interesting because I feel the exact opposite. Maybe this is because I usually have too much planned so I feel I need more unplanned, spontaneous time. Perhaps we should be looking for balance here: goals and sense of accomplishment are important, but too much planning leaves us less open to the new and interesting, and less able to react to what we learn as we go.

• A comment on Conversation: What's the overlooked gem, the book I haven't read that I must?

  Feb 21 2011: The only book I have read more than twice is "The Four-Gated City" by Doris Lessing, who well deserved her Nobel prize.
  It is the last volume of a series but can be read by itself, although when I first bought it, I got one page into it and decided I had to begin at the beginning so I went and got the other four. Still, I've read the series twice and the last volume about 6 times. It is the story of a woman who arrives in London from southern Africa after WW II, and is a brilliant study of life, politics, madness and civilization.

• A reply on Conversation: What are the effects of taxes on motivation and productivity?

  Feb 21 2011: Governments don't make decisions any more than corporations do. They also have paid managers who make the decisions who also pay taxes and therefore will have more or less to spend, accumulate or invest, so this argument does not apply specifically to governments and does not show that government decision-making somehow is not human decision-making.
  I agree that governments, if allowed to hide facts and dodge accountability, can be clumsy and cumbersome, but it is far from clear that individuals and corporations are not. Witness our recent economic problems and the utterly stupid decisions made by some financial institutions or large car companies. Not to mention many individuals who took on debt they could not service. Clumsy and cumbersome applies to all us limited humans and our institutions.
  Collectively, we do have techniques and capabilities to improve that, and the very clumsy method of making marginal changes to the gross income (taxes or fees) of those institutions is not likely to do the trick.
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  A comment on Conversation: What are the effects of taxes on motivation and productivity?

  Feb 21 2011: "Tax" seems such an emotional word that I begin to think we are too emotionally invested to think as clearly as we should over this important issue.
  Are there any peer-reviewed studies on the topic that can shed further light? Anecdotal evidence may not be accurate. Certainly, as someone with an above-average income derived entirely from paid employment, I have never changed my daily work life in response to a change in the marginal tax rate, but I don't know for sure if others are different or if it has a more subtle change in the long run; we humans are notoriously bad at understanding our own motivations.
  It probably also depends on what the tax is for. In my countries (Canada, UK) taxes pay for my medical care. In my near neighbour (USA) they would not; I would presumably pay a huge insurance company for the same service. If my payment goes up $100 per year to pay for better care does it make a difference to my motivation or productivity whether it is in the form of a tax or a payment to a corporation? I don't mean here to enter into the US debate on medicare, just to point out again that focus on "tax" as such over-simplifies the question. We are often motivated to work harder so we can buy something better; if Governments were demonstrably providing us with useful and valuable services, why would we be less motivated to buy them through "taxes" than through equivalent payments to large corporations?

• A reply on Conversation: A scientifically proveable Purpose to Human Life?

  Feb 21 2011: I found this reply just as problematic - your last sentence is just your value judgment and although I don't agree with much of what loop johnny said, I did think his reply has a place in this legitimate debate because it sparked many relevant thoughts. For example, his analogy of the apple, was useful if only because it provokes further analysis. The "purposes" of the apple are in fact not the apple's purposes at all, they are the purposes of the humans and more dimly and less obviously the "purposes" of the worm and the plant and this can illuminate the meaning of your entire topic.
  Thank you for starting the conversation, but it would serve us better if we either directly addressed the arguments of others or ignored them than if we discourage contributions by denigrating the author.

• A reply on Conversation: Should social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) merge?

  Feb 21 2011: Have a look at http://www.opensocial.org/ . I'm not necessarily advocating it just now, but it does seem to be a step towards what you are asking. I do use a couple of the proprietary platforms but don't like them because they are closed; I just use them because quite a few of my real friends use them far more than, say, email, so if I want to keep in touch I have to go inside those gated communities.
  If anyone has more information on just how open and useful the Open Social platform is, I'd like to know; I just haven't had time to look into it more.