More important than you are…
Jul 5th, 2007 by ShaunO
Thanks Andrew for a connected (well, to me anyway) inspiration to todays post …
Andrew pointed me to a video over on TED where 
Dan Dennett gives us his ‘bumper sticker’ when asked (as a philosopher) ‘what the meaning of life is’ as …
The secret to happiness:
Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
I just love folks who can communicate such profound ideas so elegantly. Do watch the whole video as Dan, in about 15 minutes, nonchalantly meanders through (seemingly – the other great communicator’s skill – making a series of complex ideas come to life with simple, accessible, presentation) a sequence of ideas which seem so simple afterwards that you might have one of those ‘yes! why didn’t I see that before…’ moments.
What also strikes me is that this is a much more elegant presentation of – and goes further into the possible connected-ness of – ideas which I was trying to explore in a previous post of mine about ‘mind evolution stuff’…
If enough people ‘see’ then hopefully, as I suggested in my previous log-winded post, we are evolving and that would represent a step towards changing the world we live in to be something (anything really..) more than it is today.
To finish, having seen a quite a few presentations at TED, I think it is a great showcase of the ‘do’ers and think’ers‘ of our day.
Other stuff:
- Robert Wright on evolutionary history at TED
- an old favorite of mine, bless ‘im, ZeFrank at TED
- Dan Dennett’s homepage
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The other TED talk that floored me last night was this one by Hans Rosling. The exploration of world poverty and the developing world is combined with a stunning display of dynamic statistical graphs. I want to give presentations like this!
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140