In “The Thought Leader,” a satire created by artist Liz Magic Laser, 10-year-old Alex Ammerman gives a TED Talk that ponders the “dark chasm of meaninglessness.” And he does it perfectly. Photo: Courtesy of Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

On the surface, the talk is “TED-like”: the round red carpet, the well-rehearsed speaker, the shadowy audience, the headset mic.

But quickly, discordant elements begin to register: the strange parenthetical markings on the floor, the inappropriate audience responses, the fact that the speaker himself is a 10-year-old boy.

Welcome to “The Thought Leader,” a satire on media spectacle and mindless optimism created by artist Liz Magic Laser for her solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires. In “The Thought Leader,” Laser plays with the impact of delivering a bleak message in the TED Talk format.

See, in watching talks, Laser noticed a theme — a certain optimism about how an individual’s work could benefit the greater good. This reminded her of the 19th-century concept of “enlightened self-interest,” and the muse led her to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, his response to the concept, considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. “It provided an uncomfortable and revealing counterpoint,” Laser says. “More than a 150 years later, Dostoevsky’s nihilistic critique still holds water.”

For the star of her talk, Laser cast a child actor, Alex Ammerman, to subvert notions of children as a “symbol of hope and change.” Ammerman flawlessly mirrors gestures of stereotypical TED speakers as he delivers his opening lines, which Laser derived from a David Foster Wallace essay: “I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. Are you a good person? Deep down, do you even really want to be a good person?”

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So how did a bright-eyed, dimpled 10-year-old come to grasp the gloom of his monologue? “We had some challenging conversations early on,” says Laser. “But as we worked together, Alex came to an understanding of the ideas at hand.” It’s true — his delivery of Dostoevsky’s bleakest ideas is both knowing and spot-on.

To film this mock-talk, Laser invited actors, friends and former students to gather in a theater in Kickstarter’s Brooklyn office. The atmosphere was festive at first, but after five numbing hours of shooting, the audience settled into palpable boredom. Despite the faithful echo of TED camerawork by cinematographers Chris Heinrich and Tom Richmond, the long dolly shots over rows of impassive faces only enhance “The Thought Leader’s” sinister aura.

Then there’s the editing. Laser removes audience reactions from their contexts, re-inserting their laughter and silence in inappropriate places, and creating “a representation of public apathy that is aggressive rather than passive,” as she puts it. Overall, it creates an atmosphere of menace.

But perhaps the most mysterious element of “The Thought Leader” is the enigmatic parentheses painted on the carpet — the focus of the opening and closing shots of the video. In part, they mirror the last line of Ammerman’s talk: “Perhaps I’m only imagining an audience in order to feel more dignified as I stand here in parenthesis.” It’s also a comment on the diminished, secondary nature of the individual standing in a forum before an indifferent and hostile audience. It adds a bleak veneer.

The Los Angeles Times’ review of Laser’s show reads, “[TED Talks] are meant to motivate and inspire. Speakers don’t typically ponder ‘the dark chasm of meaninglessness.’” And while this reflects a common misconception of TED Talks — they are meant to share ideas both hopeful and challenging — “The Thought Leader” reminds viewers that critical thinking is very much an idea worth spreading.

PS: If you are looking for a few TED Talks that do in fact ponder ‘the dark chasm of meaninglessness,’ may we suggest:

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Jim Holt. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Philosopher and writer Jim Holt skips right past the dumb quibbling questions and right to the heart of the great existential mystery: Why something, instead of nothing? Why does the universe exist? And why are we in it? The super-ultimate why question.

The greatest thinkers have obsessed over the question of existence: Wittgenstein said it’s not how things are in the world that’s mystical, it’s that there is a world at all. John Archibald Wheeler wondered, how come the universe? How come existence? Schopenhauer said that those who do not wonder about the contingency of the universe are mentally deficient. It is, says Holt, our darkest, most sublime question.

In the 17th century, Leibniz had an easy answer: The universe exists because God created it. Many people today, said Holt, have this same Judeo-Christian answer. There is no mystery. For them, God + nothing = the world. O-o-okay, but even for believers this should be problematic, says Holt, because it requires you to answer the question of why God exists. Jokes Holt, God should still think to himself: “I’m eternal, I’m all powerful … but why am I here?”

So we have: [blank] + nothing = the world. This is actually fine for Buddhists, who believe in cosmic vacuity. Buddhists, Holt says, believe that “if we let our desires melt away, we’ll see the world as it truly is, and we’ll slip into nirvana: just enough life to enjoy being dead.” Big laughs.

How about: science + nothing = the world? A purely scientific explanation like the one posited by physicist Lawrence Krauss goes something like this: Through the laws of quantum field theory, from no space, time or matter, a little nugget of false vacuum can fluctuate into existence and then … universe!

Nice try. Holt rejects this theory, too, as it treats physics like it has some ontological clout — kinda like God. Physics don’t exist outside the world, Holt says. Even a self-contained world like the one theorized by Stephen Hawking is just equations. “But what breathes fire into the equations?” asks Holt.

Okay … let’s get metaphysical then. Maybe one set of rules presides over our world, and all other sets of rules are possible, too — a vastly rich multiverse that encompasses every possibility. So on one side there’s fullness, everything, and on the other, sheer nothingness. In between, says Holt, there’s a bunch of special-case intermediate realities: there’s the most elegant one (as Brian Greene has theorized), there’s the most ethical one, and so on. These all require extra explanations.

And then there’s Holt’s theory, the one that needs no special rules: Surprise! Somewhere in between! He calls it: “A crummy, generic reality that isn’t special in any way.” This reality is random, a mixture of chaos and order, mathematical beauty and ugliness, infinite mediocrity. Is there a deity? Maybe. But it’s not perfect: “maybe it’s 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective.” This reality is an “infinite, arbitrary, pointless reality,” says Holt, to smiles and chuckles, “like champagne frothing out of the bottle endlessly. A vast universe with small pockets of charm and peace.”

David Chalmers. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“Right now you have a movie playing inside your head,” says philosopher David Chalmers. It’s an amazing movie, with 3D, smell, taste, touch, a sense of body, pain, hunger, emotions, memories, and a constant voice-over narrative. “At the heart of this movie is you, experiencing this, directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, experience of the mind and the world.”

This is one of the fundamental aspects of existence, Chalmers says: “There’s nothing we know about more directly…. but at the same time it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.” What is the difference between us and robots? Nobody knows the answers.

For much of 20th century, Chalmers says, an idea that there could be no scientific study of consciousness held sway: Psychologists studied objective facts about behavior, neuroscientists studied the material of the brain. About 20 years ago that started to change. Prominent scientists like Francis Crick  and Roger Penrose started saying: Now is the time to attack this problem. “This has been wonderful, and great, but also has limitations.” Principally, the work so far has been a search for correlations between areas in the brain and conscious states. As he says, “This is still a science of correlations, not explanations.”

Chalmers believes the questions answered so far — mainly, about what parts of the brain do which bits of processing — are the “easy” (in comparison) problems. The hard problem is why is it that all that processing should be accompanied by this movie at all.

Many say that in a few years it will turn out that consciousness is just another emergent phenomenon, “like traffic jams or hurricanes or life, and we’ll figure it out.” But Chalmers believes there are limitations to this picture. Classic cases of emergence are all about behavior, about objective functioning. “You can apply that to the brain — how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess. But why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience?”

Chalmers assures us he is a scientific materialist at heart, and that he wants a scientific theory of consciousness to work. But for a long time “I banged my head against the wall” until he concluded that what you get from a scientific theory of consciousness is always the objective behavior, but not the answer to the hard problem. “Faced with this, radical ideas might be needed. We might need one or two ideas that might seem crazy.”

Chalmers has a few candidates.

One crazy idea is from Daniel Dennett: There is no hard problem. The whole idea of the subjective movie is a kind of illusion. All we have to do is explain the objective behavior, and then we’re done. Chalmers respects the idea, but doesn’t like it: “I say more power to him, but for me that is too close to denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfying.”

So Chalmer’s own first crazy idea: consciousness is fundamental. “Physicists sometimes take parts of the universe as fundamental building blocks — space or time, or mass.” These are taken as primitive and the rest is built up from there. Sometimes the list of fundamentals expands, such as when James Clerk Maxwell realized that electromagnetism couldn’t be explained from other known laws of physics, and so he postulated electric charge as a new fundamental idea. Chalmers thinks that’s where we are with consciousness.

Importantly, “This doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t do science with it. This opens up the way to do science with it.” He thinks we need to connect this fundamental with the other fundamentals.

Chalmer’s second crazy idea: every system might be conscious at some level. Consciousness might be universal, an idea called panpsychism. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking, or wracked with angst. Rather, it’s that “Photons have some element of raw subjective feeling, a precursor to consciousness.” Pause. “This might seem crazy to us,” he says, “but not to people from other cultures.”

But also, he goes on, a simple way to link consciousness to fundamental laws is to link it to information processing. It’s possible that wherever information is being processed, there is some consciousness. Chalmers put that idea forward about twenty years ago, but at the time it wasn’t well developed. Now a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has created a measure, phi, that counts the amount of information integration. In a human, there is a lot information integration. In a mouse, still quite a lot. As you go down to worms, microbes and photons it falls off rapidly, but never goes to zero. “I don’t know if this is right, but right now it’s the leading theory.”

If true, this theory has many implications. “I used to think I shouldn’t eat anything that’s conscious. If you’re a panpsychist, you’ll be pretty hungry.” It’s also natural to ask about other systems, like computers. If consciousness is integrated information, and computers do integrate information, that raises ethical issues about developing intelligent computer systems, and turning them off.

Or you could think about bigger systems: “Does Canada have a consciousness? Or the TED audience? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s one worth taking seriously.”

Chalmers closes by repeating that these are crazy ideas, designed to solve a hard problem, “It’s a radical idea, and I don’t know if it’s correct. This is the hardest problem in science and philosophy, so we aren’t going to figure it out overnight, but I do think we’re going to figure it out eventually.”

In today’s talk, “The Long Reach of Reason,” Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein have been animated by Cognitive Media.

I want to give you the back story behind today’s TED Talk and make the case that it’s one of the most significant we’ve ever posted. And I’m not just talking about its incredible animation. I’m talking about its core idea.

Two years ago the psychologist Steven Pinker and the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who are married, came to TED to take part in a form of Socratic dialog. Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason She sought to argue that Reason was a much more powerful force in history than it’s normally given credit for. He initially defended the modern consensus among psychologists and neurologists, that most human behavior is best explained through other means: unconscious instincts of various kinds. But over the course of the dialog, he is persuaded by her, and together they look back through history and see how reasoned arguments ended up having massive impacts, even if those impacts sometimes took centuries to unfold.

The script was clever, the argument powerful. However on the day, they bombed. And I’m mainly to blame.

You see, we gambled that year on seeking to expand our repertoire of presentation formats. Their dialog appeared in a session we called “The Dinner Party.” The idea was that all the speakers at the session would be seated around a table. They would individually give their talks, then come sit back down with the others to debate the talk, and everyone would end up the wiser. Seemed like an interesting idea at the time. But it didn’t work. Somehow the chemistry of the dinner guests never ignited. And perhaps the biggest reason for that was that I, as head of the table trying to moderate the conversation, had my back to the audience. The audience disengaged, the evening fell flat, and Steve and Rebecca’s dialog, which also suffered from some audio issues, was rated too low for us to consider posting it online.

At TED2012, Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explored how reason shaped human history. We’ve animated the talk to bring new life to this important idea. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

That would normally have been the end of it. Except that a strange thing happened. I could not get their core idea out of my head. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that TED’s entire mission rested on the premise that ideas really matter. And unless reasoned argument is the prime tool shaping those ideas, they can warp into pretty much anything, good or bad.

And so I tried to figure if there was a way to rescue the talk. And it turned out that there was. It came in the shape of Andrew Park, who, in my humble-but-true opinion is the world’s greatest animator of concepts. His RSA Animate series has notched up millions of views for sometimes difficult topics, and we have worked with him before to animate talks from Denis Dutton and some of our TED-Ed lessons (including one from yours truly on Questions No One Knows the Answer To.) If he could make me interesting, he sure as hell could do so for Pinker and Goldstein.

And so it turned out. Andrew and his amazing team at Cognitive fixed the audio issue and turned the entire talk into an animated movie of such imagination, humor and, most of all, explanatory power, it took my breath away.

And so here it is. The Long Reach of Reason. A talk in animated dialog form, arguing that Reason is capable of extending its influence across centuries, making it the single most powerful driver of long-term change. Please watch it. A) you’ll be blown away by how it’s animated. B) it may change forever how you think about Reason. And that’s a good thing.

It is a delicious example in favor of the talk’s conclusions that it was the power of its own arguments that kept it alive and turned it into a animation capable of far greater reach than the original.

For me, the argument in this talk is ultimately a profoundly optimistic one. If it turns out to be valid, then there really can be such a thing in the world as moral progress. People are genuinely capable of arguing each other into new beliefs, new mindsets that ultimately will benefit humanity. If you think that’s unlikely, watch the talk. You might just find yourself reasoned to a different opinion.

An experiment I will never try again: hosting a session with my back to the audience. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

At TEDxBratislava, I shared 4 stories about death that have circulated over and over again, across cultures and time. Below, notes on where you can see each story reflected. Photo: TEDxBratislava

We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse: the knowledge that — someday, somehow — we will die. It’s a terrifying thought, and so we look for a way out. In my talk from TEDxBratislava (and in my book Immortality) Stephen Cave: The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death , I walk through four stories that people have told throughout cultures and time, as a way to manage this very real fear. Here, some of the myths, books, movies and articles where you can see each of these stories reflected. I’ll end with a fifth story — I call it the “wisdom narrative” — an alternative to these oft-repeated tales.

1. The Elixir story

Almost every known culture has legends of a magic pill or potion that can ward off ageing and disease. Alchemists in both East and West, for example, believed they could brew an elixir of life, while the Spaniard Juan Ponce de León believed he would find the fountain of youth in Florida. Jorge Luis Borges wonderfully satirises this quest in his short story ‘The Immortal’, which details the terrible consequences of finding the water “that cleanses men of death.”

The idea of being immune to death is one that fills us with hope and dread in equal measure. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift gives us the Struldbrugs, who never die but continue to age, so becoming shriveled and senile. This is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus, the tragic prince granted immortality by Zeus, but not eternal youth.

The most popular recent exploration of the elixir myth is in the Harry Potter books and films. From the Philosopher’s Stone to the Horcruxes, the series asks whether we should accept death or rebel against it.

Despite warnings from myth and literature, the quest for the elixir continues. The historian David Boyd Haycock chronicles the many attempts of serious science to defeat aging and disease in his book The Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer, or you can watch one of the leading advocates of a modern day elixir, Aubrey de Grey, in his TED Talk.

2. The Resurrection story

Given the success rate of the average elixir, it is a good idea to have a back up plan — and that is just what the Resurrection Story offers: it promises that if you die, you can nonetheless physically rise to live again.

The most influential story of resurrection can of course be found in the Gospels. If you’ve not read them for a while, you might be surprised — for example, by the passage that tries to explain away rumours that the disciples themselves took Jesus’s body (Matthew 28:11-15).

But the story of Jesus was by no means the first legend of a god-figure who died and rose again, so defeating death for himself and the rest of us. The ancient Egyptian god Osiris, for example, did the same as the first mummy. Spectacular artifacts from the three thousand year cult he inspired can be seen in museums across the world, especially the British Museum in London, the Neues Museum in Berlin, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or of course Cairo’s own Egyptian Museum.

Whereas some hope the gods will resurrect them to live again, others hope that scientists will do it. Like the Elixir Story, this theme has inspired classic works of fiction, such as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, in which we read how the eponymous young scientist “on a dreary night of November,” manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” that lies in front of him.

Like modern day mummies, those hoping to be resurrected by science go to great lengths to preserve as much as possible of their bodies. Their preferred method though is not balms and bandages, but the deep freeze — a process known as cryonics. A wonderful exploration of the troubles this can lead to can be found in Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper. Or for an account of one man’s determination to be frozen, read my Aeon magazine article, “Frozen Dead Guys,” on cryonics. 

3. The Soul Story

The majority of people on earth believe that they have one, and this belief plays a central role in most religions.

One of the earliest attempts to prove the existence of the soul can be found in Plato’s account of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo, in which the philosopher explains his belief in the afterlife before calmly drinking deadly poison.

Early Christians preferred to believe they would attain immortality by being physically resurrected, but as time went by and the Last Judgement failed to materialise, more and more turned to the Platonic doctrine of the soul. The Christian version of what happens to this soul once it departs the body is most vividly expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, recently newly translated into English by Clive James.

Many other religious and cultural traditions subscribe to some idea of a soul — for example, Hinduism. In the short, powerful text the Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna tells us how, “Just as a man casts off worn out clothing and accepts new ones, even so the embodied soul discards worn out bodies and enters into different ones.”

Buddhism has a similar belief in reincarnation — the movement of the soul from one body to another — although it confusingly also teaches that there is no permanent soul or self. The film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, is a charming exploration of these themes.

The dark side of the Soul Story is when these spirits of the departed come back to haunt us. Ghost stories come close to being a human universal, found in every culture. One of the most enjoyable — and appropriate to this time of year — is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

4. The Legacy Story

The Legacy Story is about living on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great hero Achilles, who sacrificed his life at Troy in order to win immortal fame. The film Troy with Brad Pitt in the lead role nicely captures Achilles’ yearning to be the most renowned of heroes. Or you could read Homer’s original The Iliad and The Odyssey, which contains a more nuanced assessment of the quest for fame.

But nowhere is the futility of this quest more pithily expressed than in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem Ozymandias, which contains these lines about a traveller finding a ruined colossus in the desert:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

There are, however, other ways of leaving a legacy than becoming famous — for example, by leaving a biological legacy. In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins describes how the real immortals are our genes, whose lifespans can be measured in millions of years.

Or our legacy might be our contribution to a much greater whole — for example, Gaia, the entire web of life. This is the view taken by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in their excellent book What is Life?.

An Alternative: The Wisdom Story

None of these immortality stories is entirely convincing — that is why there are four, as the flaws in each lead people, or sometimes entire civilisations, from one to the next.

But there is an alternative — a fifth story that can also be found weaving its way through history. Its oldest expression is in the fantastic Epic of Gilgamesh, a dramatic story of one king’s pursuit of immortality and ultimate reconciliation with death.

Coming to terms with mortality isn’t easy. It helps if we first recognise that immortality probably isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — as Borges’s short story The Immortal, mentioned above, expresses. This theme is also at the heart of Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, which can also be enjoyed as an opera (with the same name) by Leoš Janáček.

The next step is to realise that we need not fear death — something first expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, whose few surviving writings are well worth reading. “While we are, death is not; when death is come, we are not,” he wrote. “Death is thus of no concern either to the living or to the dead.”

The final step is to cultivate those virtues that help us to appreciate the time we have, rather than worry about it being finite. It can help, for example, to focus on the present, a theme common to many wisdom traditions; or to focus on other people, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell put it: “the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it — so at least it seems to me — is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” (from his essay ‘How to Grow Old’ in Portraits From Memory And Other Essays).

And the third virtue is gratitude, expressed beautifully in this TED talk by the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. We shouldn’t waste our time worrying about our time being limited, but should rather, as the Greek Epicurean Philodemus put it, “receive each additional moment of time in a manner appropriate to its value; as if one were having an incredible stroke of luck.”

Stephen Cave is a philosopher and writer. Read much more about him »

TEDxColbyCollege speaker Daniel H. Cohen talks about the subtleties of arguing — and how we shouldn’t think of it as a war.

Daniel H. Cohen argues for a good argument.

Daniel H. Cohen: For argument's sake In today’s talk, given at TEDxColbyCollege, Cohen asks us to set aside our goal of winning arguments in favor of gaining a greater appreciation for the legitimate points being made by the other person.

In an effort to gain more appreciation for that argument, we asked Cohen if he would answer a few of our questions over email. Read his answers below and, please, feel free to argue with them in the comments.

What is the best argument you’ve ever had?

There are quite a few that stand out — beginning with one late-night argument with a couple of other philosophy majors when I was an undergraduate on the nature of reality, focusing on Spinoza’s monism versus pluralistic and atomistic approaches. What made it so remarkable was that, over the course of the argument — which lasted several hours — all of our positions evolved to the point that I think everyone involved managed to occupy and defend each position at some point. The result: no clear winner, but we all came away with a much greater understanding and appreciation for all of these philosophies.

I should also mention an ongoing realism/anti-realism argument that I’ve been having with a poet … for the last 30 years! I’m not sure how much progress we’ve made towards any real resolution, but it’s convinced me that progress and resolution are not the most important measures of argumentation.

What defines an argument? Does this come close: Before an argument, two or more people have a set of incompatible beliefs and, over the course of the argument, some of those beliefs are refined to form compatible beliefs.

As you might expect, I’m not keen on overly adversarial conceptions of argument, nor on exclusively epistemic accounts of what arguments are about. There can be other things at stake besides beliefs. We can argue about what to do, what attitudes to take, how to understand things, etc. It is true that we can always shoehorn differences into questions about beliefs, but that’s a Procrustean Bed that fits some arguments better than others. Ideally, there will be cognitive changes resulting from arguments, but there are more cognitive achievements than acquiring, jettisoning or changing beliefs.

In your talk, you’re discussing theoretical arguments. Is there a fundamental difference between practical arguments about taking action (like who should take out the trash, or whether to bomb another country) and arguments about abstract concepts?

There are many differences — many of which are both very large and very important. But I’m not sure I have a good, short answer, except to say that a good arguer will argue differently when the goal is simply getting her way than when the goal is to convince someone of something. As Michael Gilbert likes to point out, if an argument about the empty gas tank in the car that one friend lent to another threatens to destroy their 20-year friendship, you know that the argument isn’t really about the empty gas tank. And I would add that any friends who would allow an argument about an empty gas tank to undermine their friendship aren’t very good arguers — and probably weren’t really very good friends.

Should arguments always have conclusions?

Heavens, no! If that 30-year argument I’ve been having with the poet ever ended, I’d miss it terribly. Arguing can be a very positive form of connection and communication, but it requires good arguers to keep it that way.

John Searle shares why it is possible to study consciousness in today’s talk, from TEDxCERN.

John Searle studies consciousness — which, as he points out in today’s talk, is a “curiously neglected subject in our scientific and philosophical culture.” Curiously — because it is, after all, a pre-condition for anything else we think about. And yet neglected — because consciousness is a subject that makes scientists huffy (they see it as something subjective) and that makes philosophers uncomfortable (since it speaks to the mind and body being of different realms).

In this talk, Searle lays out a simple way to understand this complex phenomenon: as a condition of our biology. As he puts it, all states of consciousness are the result of neurobiological processes in the brain. “Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion or mitosis,” he says. “Once you accept that, most though not all of the hard problems about consciousness evaporate.”

Watch this fast-paced talk from TEDxCERN as Searle debunks some commonly held ideas about consciousness — like that it is an illusion, that it is a computer program running in the brain, that you can’t make objective claims about something that is subjective. And once you’ve checked out this romp through the experience of experiencing, watch these other talks that deal with the tricky issue of consciousness.

Dan Dennett: The illusion of consciousness Dan Dennett: The illusion of consciousness Philosopher Dan Dennett agrees that there is a strange bias against studying consciousness—he says his colleague’s lips snarl upon hearing his field of interest. But after this point, Dennett diverges a bit from Searle. In this talk from TED2003, Dennett shares why every single person thinks they’re an expert in consciousness — and why each of us might be wrong. It’s a fascinating look at the tricks of the brain that are a result of biology.

Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness In this talk from TED2011, Antonio Damasio points out an amazing fact — that every morning, we wake up and are conscious once again. Showing stunning images of a living brain, Damasio takes a closer look at the things we take for granted — a flow of mental images, an experience of a self, and ownership of a subjective perspective.

Simon Lewis: Don't take consciousness for granted Simon Lewis: Don’t take consciousness for granted Simon Lewis has experienced “the full consciousness of inner space” — after a devastating car accident, he was in a coma for a month. In this talk, from the INK Conference, he outlines some of the ways that consciousness is under threat all around the world — from head injuries, strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, migraines, depression and drug addiction as well as some surprising other factors.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Political philosopher Michael Sandel — the second “Michael from Harvard” this session — returns to TED in the last session of TEDGlobal, “All Together Now,” to address the marketization of our culture.

These days there’s very little money can’t buy. If you ever wind up in jail in San Diego, CA, and you find your cell uncomfortable, don’t fret; simply pay $82 and you’ll be upgraded. Or if you find yourself in Washington, DC, en route to a Congressional hearing, but you hear that the line is around the block, don’t give up; you can pay someone through a line-standing company to wait in line for you. You just have to show up at the last minute and take your seat.

Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate

In the past three decades, says Sandel, we’ve undergone a quiet revolution, drifting without realizing from a market economy to a market society, where almost everything is up for sale. In a market society, market values dominate every aspect of life: personal relationships, family life, health, education, politics, law, civil life.

Why is this a problem? According to Sandel, two reasons: First, inequality. As money becomes important to access to the essentials of the good life — decent healthcare, the best education, political voice and influence, etc. — inequality becomes more and more important. And the second reason is that when market thinking and values enter the sphere of certain social goods and practices, they change the meaning of those practices — and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about.

Sandel gives the example of cash incentives in schools. Some schools in New York, Chicago and Washington DC have begun programs to motivate students from disadvantaged backgrounds by offering money for grades: $50 for an A, $35 for a B, and so on. A program in Dallas offers students $2 for every book they read.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Sandel, famous for engaging his students in lecture, asks the audience whether, as the head of a major school system, they would consider experimenting with cash incentives. Most of the audience votes against the incentives, but there’s also a sizable number in favor. One attendee, Heike Moses from Switzerland, says this kills intrinsic motivation for students to want to learn and wonder about the world. What happens when you stop paying them? From the audience, Elizabeth Loftus, who spoke on Tuesday about the fiction of memory, says, “Why not try it?” She is in favor of experimentation, saying she would measure how many books students read while she paid them and after she stopped.

Indeed, says Sandel, that’s what experts disagree on as well: Will cash incentives drive out the higher motivation, to learn and read? It turns out the cash for good grades programs had very mixed results, while the $2 to read books was successful. Sort of. Students did read more books — but they read shorter ones.

What this illustrates is a false assumption held by many economists, says Sandel: that markets are inert and don’t taint the goods they exchange. This may very well be true with material goods, but not so with goods like teaching, learning, engaging in civic life. Market thinking can actually change the character of these social practices, so we have to really think about where markets belong and where they don’t.

But this debate may never happen. As Sandel says, “Over the past 30 decades, as market reasoning has gathered prestige, our public discourse has become hollowed out and empty.” Public discourse and collective reasoning about the value and meaning of the social practices we prize is deteriorating, as we shun controversial questions for fear of disappointment.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The problem of market thinking, says Sandel, is the illusion of commonality against the backdrop of rising inequality. Marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who aren’t live separate lives — and this is terrible for democracy, says Sandel. Though democracy doesn’t require perfect equality, it does require that citizens share in a common life, brushing up against different social backgrounds and people from different walks of life. This is how, he concludes, we come to care for the common good. Which is something money can’t buy, and can actively work against.

After rousing applause and a standing ovation, Curator Chris Anderson calls Michael Porter (Harvard Michael #1) back on stage to respond to Sandel. Porter on the one hand believes fully in the power of markets to solve social problems, while Sandel is quite skeptical about their promise, says Anderson. Porter, though, says he doesn’t disagree with Sandel, but that business per se isn’t the problem. There are all kinds of social good areas where the market can help but where it hasn’t gone far enough, like with food security, healthcare for all, and so on. Sandel responds, “I’m not against markets, but I am in favor of keeping markets in their place,” to enthusiastic applause. With a laugh, Anderson says, “Well, I for one am all for the ‘Michael v Michael Market Enlightenment Roadshow’ happening.”

Michael Sandel’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com »

Peter Singer explains the “effective altruism” movement at TED2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Every day, most of us do something morally indefensible — we go about our lives without sending help to the 6.9 million children under the age of 5 who will die this year from poverty-related disease. In today’s talk, philosopher Peter Singer makes the case that ignoring these kids is as inhumane as ignoring a child who’s been hit by a car on the street in front of you.

Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism “Does it really matter that they’re far away?” asks Singer. “I don’t think it does make a morally relevant difference — the fact that they’re not right in front of us, or the fact that they’re of a different nationality or race.”

But he’s not saying this to make us feel bad and helpless. Today’s talk actually delivers good news: that through what Singer calls “effective altruism,” we all have the ability to make a difference. Effective altruism begins with reason – the realization that all lives are of equal value — and looking for charities that affect the most lives, the most effectively.

To hear how a single person — and one who is nowhere close to a billionaire – can make a big impact for good in the world, watch this talk. And below, some resources to get you thinking about giving more effectively.

Peter Singer’s top 10 recommended charities:

1. Against Malaria Foundation. Of those 6.9 million children who die every year of poverty-related illness, 1 million succumb to malaria. AMF provides insecticide-treated bed nets, which only cost $5 apiece.
2. Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. Protecting a child from worm-based disease for a full year costs around 50 cents. This organization works with governments to make sure it happens.
3. The Humane League. Invests time, money and energy to reduce animal cruelty and save the lives of animals, focusing on farmed animals.
4. GiveDirectly. This nonprofit transfers money to poor individuals in Kenya, letting them spend it for food and other basic needs, or on high-return investments.
5. Oxfam International. This mega aid organization works in a wide range of areas, including disaster relief, education, sanitation and women’s rights.
6. Proven Impact Fund. Dedicated to data and results, this fund from Innovations for Poverty Action supports interventions with strong evidence of success.
7. The Fistula Foundation. Fistula is a ghastly injury during childbirth, and it afflicts women living in the poorest areas of the world. This organization provides needed surgery.
8. The Hunger Project. Encouraging men and women to end their own hunger, this organization assists poor villages for five years, relying on the local workforce to build skills and take over before they leave.
9. Vegan Outreach. A nonprofit that seeks to expose and end cruelty to animals.
10. Population Services International. A global health organization that focuses on family planning, a simple service that can improve the health of women and their children.
    

Resources for finding other charities to support:

• GiveWell. This nonprofit does in-depth research on charities and highlights a small number that do a remarkable amount of good per dollar they receive. (Singer recommends this site.)
• Effective Animal Activism. One of the causes nearest to Singer’s heart is animal liberation, and he is impressed with this charity evaluator that focuses on animal suffering.
• Charity Navigator. The largest charity evaluator in the U.S., Charity Navigator has data and ratings for nearly 6,000 charities.
• Great Nonprofits. A site dedicated to informing would-be donors through reviews from board members, volunteers, experts and regular folks who’ve interfaced with a charity.

Resources Singer recommends for connecting with other people interested in doing good:

• Giving What We Can. The members of this international society make a bold pledge: to donate 10% of their income to eliminating poverty in the developing world. A good place to connect with others, and to find high-quality organizations to support.
• The Life You Can Save. At this site, you can pledge to donate any percentage of your income to those in need. In addition to directing you to great charities to support, it’s also a log for local volunteer opportunities.
• Effective Altruism. A blog from Peter Singer and William MacAskill dedicated to the tenets of effective altruism.
• The High Impact Network. This group has a great acronym – THINK. Members meet up to ponder effective giving — both strategically and creatively.

A resource for finding the career that does the greatest good:

• 80,000 Hours. Named after the number of hours most people will work over their lifetime, this career advice site has a twist – it gives advice on how different careers can have an impact on poverty. As Singer mentions in his talk, the site doesn’t shy away from unusual answers; it suggests that working in finance and donating a percentage of your income could fund multiple aid workers.

And further reading in effective altruism:

• The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty. Peter Singer’s book about how each person can be a part of the solution to poverty, it calls for a cultural change to consider poverty eradication a natural part of a moral life.
• The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress. Peter Singer’s classic study of ethics, which examines the question: Where does our desire for altruism come from? He shows how it might come down to the biological drive to protect or kin — but that it is also a matter of reason.
• The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. A bold look from Peter Singer and Jim Mason on how our individual food choices affect animals, the environment and our fellow human beings.

Want more advice on how to parse the world of nonprofits and giving? Check out Dan Pallotta’s tips for picking a charity that’s right for you »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In 1812, four men met for a “philosophical breakfast” at Cambridge University: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell. Over food and drinks, they debated the state of knowledge –- imagining a world in which thinkers drew conclusions based on data, where research was done for the good of humanity rather than for financial gain, where researchers questioned each other in the name of moving each other forward and where research received outside funding rather than requiring an individual to pay for it themselves.

Laura Snyder: The Philosophical Breakfast Club In today’s talk, historian Laura Snyder gives us an introduction to the discussions of these four men, who eventually became known as The Philosophical Breakfast Club. While their ideas form the basis of scientific inquiry now, their concepts were radical at the time, says Snyder in this talk from TEDGlobal 2012. It would be another 20 years before the term “scientist” would be coined — by Whewell. To hear about the word’s dramatic unveiling, watch this talk.

The Philsophical Breakfast Club members went on to great things. Babbage invented the first mechanical calculator, and the first prototype of a computer. Herschel was an astronomer who mapped the stars – and also invented photography. Jones was an economist who inspired Marx. And Whewell – who also originated the words cathode and ion — spearheaded global research with his work on tides.

Interestingly, groundbreaking work often seems to happen in groups. Throughout history, clubs of writers, philosophers and artists have formed, with thinkers in the same area gathering for discussion and collaboration. For some of these groups, multiple members went on to renown. It begs the question: Can collectivity push talented individuals to greater things than they could achieve on their own?

Below, a few clubs notable for their influence on modern thought.

The Socrates School
Notable members: philosophers Socrates, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle
Time frame: Approximately 400 years BC
Not at all a school with desks and a blackboard, this group was known for asking big questions about politics, human nature, life and reality, and debating the answers in riveting discussions, many of which were captured on paper in texts like Plato’s Dialogues. Socrates devoted his life to teaching the youth of Athens and, together, this group set the foundations for Western philosophy.

The Bloomsbury Group
Notable members: writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, economist John Maynard Keynes, critic Clive Bell and painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant
Time frame: 1907 through the 1930s
While it’s clear that they had meetings, often at the home of Clive and Vanessa Bell in the Bloomsbury district of Central London, this circle of thinkers is hard to pin down as they denied being a formal group at all. The network included husbands, wives, siblings, friends and rivals, all exploring concepts of modernity in literature, criticism, economics and art.

Stratford-on-Odeon
Notable members: writers Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, poet Ezra Pound, composer George Antheil, artist Man Ray
Time frame: 1920s
“Stratford-on-Odeon” was James Joyce’s nickname for the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, in Paris’ Left Bank on the Rue de l’Odéon. The store became a hub for British and American modernists, and store owner Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. The store was closed during the German occupation of Paris in WWII — despite Hemingway’s fabled effort to liberate it himself. (A second bookstore, popular with the Beat Generation, continues to exist at 37 rue de la Bûcherie.)

The Algonquin Round Table
Notable members: writers Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kauffman, Franklin Pierce Adams, Marc Connolly, Edna Ferber
Time frame: 1920s
This New York City writers group formed as a lark, convened to share wisecracks and snide remarks among a group of humor writers, critics, columnists and playwrights, many associated with the young New Yorker magazine. The group ended up meeting almost daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel.

The Inklings
Notable members: writers J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Roger Lancelyn Green, Adam Fox, Nevil Coghilland
Time frame: 1930s and 1940s
A literary discussion group at Oxford, the Inklings would read and discuss each others’ work — most famously helping Tolkien shape The Lord of the Rings. While meetings were generally held in C.S. Lewis’ room, some were held at an Oxford pub called The Eagle and the Child.

The Factory
Notable members: artists Andy Warhol and his stars Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga, artist Salvador Dali, writers Allen Ginsburg and Truman Capote, musicians Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, designer Betsey Johnson
Time frame: The 1960s
The Factory was the name of Andy Warhol’s 1960s studio in New York City. The aluminum-foil-covered space became a gathering spot for artists, filmmakers and musicians, many who were pioneering experimental art. The Factory was also famous for wild parties and sexual exploration – and for being the place where many of our modern ideas of fame were formed.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Moral philosopher Peter Singer starts the last session of TED2013, “A Ripple Effect?” with a shocking video of a 2-year-old girl in China who was hit by a van — and then a second van — and ignored by passers-by as she lay dying in an alley. He asks of the audience: Would you have stopped and helped this girl? Not surprisingly, the unanimous response was yes. Well, every day that we don’t help others, he says, it’s like leaving this girl crippled in the alley. In 2012, Singer says, UNICEF reported that 6.9 million children under 5 died from preventable poverty-relatable diseases like malaria. Does it really matter that we’re not walking past these children in the street, that they’re far away? According to Singer, there is no morally relevant difference.

There’s a new movement of people who are realizing how necessary it is to help others. It’s called effective altruism. Using empathy and intellect, it appeals to both heart and head. Because reason is not a neutral tool to help you get whatever you want, says Singer, but to get perspective on the situation. Effective altruism has been led by figures in philosophy, math, economics — which may be surprising because people think philosophy has nothing to do with the real world, economics is for the selfish, math is just for nerds. Indeed, the most effective altruists in history — Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett — are “nerds” who realize that it’s necessary to give to charity and to make sure that charity is effective.

Singer asks and answers questions about effective altruism:

1. How much of a difference can I make?

You don’t have to be a billionaire, says Singer. Meet Tony Ord, a philosophy researcher. He realized that with the money he was going to make over his lifetime, he could cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left to live a perfectly adequate life. He started Giving what we can, to ask people to give 10 percent of their income over their lifetime to fight against global poverty.

2. Am I expected to abandon my career?

Meet Will Crouch, a graduate student in philosophy who began 80,000 Hours (roughly the number of hours you spend in your career), which helps people find careers that make the biggest possible difference in the world. Surprisingly, one career he encourages people to go into is finance and banking, because the more you earn the more you can give. If you earn a big salary, rather than becoming an aid worker yourself, you could pay the salaries of five aid workers in developing countries.

Singer and one of his students started an organization called The life you can save, which aims to encourage people to see that charity is part of living a normal life.

3. Isn’t charity bureaucratic and ineffective anyway?

One of the most important aspects of effective altruism is measuring your impact quantitatively. You can pay to provide and train a guard dog for a blind American, which costs about $40,000. But with that money you could cure 400 to 2,000 people in developing countries of blindness from glaucoma, which costs about $20 per person. Resources like Givewell and Effective Animal Activism help find those organizations that are truly effective.

4. Isn’t it a burden to give up so much?

No, says Singer. Giving helps lift the immense weight of living a Sisyphean life. The consumer lifestyle is: Work hard, make money, spend money on goods, run out of money, start again to maintain happiness. It’s a hedonic treadmill you can never get off. Effective altruism allows you to demonstrably contribute to the lives of others while also adding meaning and fulfillment to your life.

Peter Singer’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com»

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Watch Julian Baggini’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.