TED Community » Owen Allen

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Spiritual and human development; Betterment of the world; Seeing the patterns in a complexity of information.

An idea worth spreading

If sacrifice is giving up the lesser for the greater, then sacrifice is dependent on how the world appears to us.
Falling is an efficient use of gravity. Walking is catching while falling. Balance is constant falling a little bit. Loss of balance is falling lots. Loss of balance is flying. Society is like a child trying to learn walking or running. When we get that right, maybe we will learn to fly. I wonder what that will look like?

Comments

• TEDCred score: 0.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Talk: Julian Baggini: Is there a real you?

  Jan 24 2012: And, possibly, we don't experience our soul, just the reflection of it on the lake of consciousness created by language. Which is why the "Word of God" is so essential to our development of self and society. It is a game changer, changing how we and others and the world occur because it changes that occurrence through language. The idea of the soul is about how we occur to ourselves, but more, that it can occur there is vastness and wonderfulness beyond all experience, and that is a powerful stimulation to our sense of being and consciousness and who we will become.

• A comment on Talk: Julian Baggini: Is there a real you?

  Jan 24 2012: Julian's concept seems to get down to how we use language, particular naming, to categorise a collection of elements that create a function. Humans are good at this and brain damage can destroy it. It would seem we use this faculty to name an internal perception of a single functionality from which we also name things, as "I". The question then, seems, does the sense of a functional "I" come with the ability to name it or was there a sense of an integrated whole which, when we developed language, we then called "I" or maybe, as I suspect, the development of a sense of an integral whole sense and the language development are confluent. In otherwords "I" names the internal sense that comes from eons of slowly being able to distinguish more and more elements of function, elements within elements, and that many elements make up a bigger picture. And we learnt to manipulate elements through our body and our voice. And each time we made a distinction, we created a new sound for it. And eventually we made a distinction between the function that was making distinctions and other elements, and we called it "me". We couldn't distinguish every element inside our function, and, even now we can only do it by indirect means, so we don't, can't have a sense of other elements because the sense itself is a reiterativeness of naming our whole function. If we stop naming the function "I", this is a dissasociative state that is cool for short term hypnosis because you can perform without awareness, but otherwise very seriously disabling, perhaps causing a number of disintegrated mental states. Schizophrenia is the most well known of dissasociative states where the language function itself separates portion and the person thinks that there is an external voice speaking to them from some 'other' when it is just the language centre making stuff up. The Schizophrenic person is, in part, the voice talking to themselves, they just think it is not, inversely proving Julian's main thesis.