TED Talks

TED.com

Will Wright: Toys that make worlds.

Will's new game is called Spore. The Wikipedia entry seems to suggest a 2008 release and that EA Maxis (Electronic Arts) is the developer. I was impress in the TED demo with the idea of moving from the cell view to the organism view to the society view and even to the universe view. Maybe in the actual game you have to earn your way up this long chain.

I have not been much on "learning my way" up games now that I am 60+. I like to see what they are like. I have not played HALO3 but did play a fair amount of HALO 1 or 2. My younger daughter Elizabeth got into mapping the spaceship so she could get back to a desired place and I loved helping her with that. But generally my days of spending 100s of hours on a game are over, except of course for go!

Dan Dennett: Can we know our own minds?.

Dan's talk contains a lot of the "tricks" that I use to show kids that their "mind" is fooling them. I was not as impressed with the tricks as I hoped I would be, given the unlimited resources at Dan's disposal. I still go back to the two dots on the wall and how they demo the blind spot in the back of your retina and how your brain fools your mind into thinking there is no blind spot. Click Here to see a quick explanation of this Blind Spot idea.

Anyway, I was hoping that Dan had some more good demonstrations I can use in classes and maybe with a little more examination I can. His are not bad but may be hard to actually use in the classroom. One needs the video and I only have the video of him doing it. We will see. He also mentions other TED talks that I will look at and he does an excellent job talking about consciousness in general.

As he puts it, our bodies are made up of 100 trillion little robots, none of them with an individual consciousness. So what makes us feel we have one? Or that we're in control of it?

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