David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

http://www.ted.com For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and the pace of change was glacial. The rise of scientific understanding transformed the world within a few centuries. Why? Physicist David Deutsch proposes a subtle answer.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

Category:

Science & Technology

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• David
• Deutsch
• TEDTalks
• TED
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• science
• scientific
• explanation
• philosophy
• myth
• religion
• revolution
• induction
• testable

[Remindor]

Creationism is silly. They just keep trying to use complexity as an argument against evolution. Seriously, creationists are like children... We've shown them quite clearly how evolution is capable of producing complex organisms... They just stop for a second, pull out another example of higher complexity and think it will make a difference to their argument. The thing is; THERE IS NO BOUNDARY for complexity under evolution. Heck even computers are an indirect result of human evolution.

[HerbertJablonski]

sounds like the british christopher walken?

[iwanabana]

@xSilverPhinxx forget about it. the economy is simply killing off the general creativity and explorational minds.

you work, you get money. you save, you buy, you have no money so you have to work.

enlightenment no more! who cares if the neutrinos zipped through spacetime. the population didn't give a damn about their existance in the universe, which hardly even matters more than an ant round the backyard, and not even a sense of gratitude of being alive! ahh, wall street ftw.

[crudhousefull]

What's scarier than the creationists are the "ahhhh"ists that ahhh whenever Darwin's theory is mentioned. Okay...so many sequences have been seen and recorded. Great for mankind. Many ways of manipulating these sequences and materials have been devised. Great for mankind. Nothing on why sequences are as they are or how materials have come to be.

[TomFynn]

@3877michael

Religion is wishful thinking.

Science is a method to avoid fooling yourself.

There is a difference.

[lbjeffery]

Picked up the book by accident blew me away

[TheBiddleMan]

I bought this dudes book. He seriously is amazing.

[3877michael]

@BurningPinguin And why is that? Consciousness is the tool of science. If you do not know and understand the tool you use to explore science then how can you trust your conclusions ? Both science and religion share the same consciousness of a living person. Science and religion are fruits from the same tree.

[BurningPinguin]

@3877michael Religion is about how to live your life. Science is about life as a phenomena.

Two totally different things. Trying to choose one over the other or merging them is useless.

[3877michael]

Science and religion may meet under morphic fields. I hope so!