Life after TED

Image credit: TEDxBrainport 2011, Vincent van den Hoogen.

It’s been over a week since I gave a talk at the TEDxBrainport event. Here is how the organizing committee is now describing my talk:

How real is reality? Are we all collectively cheating ourselves that the world that surrounds us is real? A bit like the movie ‘The Matrix’ but without machines at the steering wheel. It's this mind-boggling thought that Kastrup leaves the audience with. Starting with the bivalent operation of computers – the instrument we use to investigate the working of our own brain – via the definition of logic, Kastrup holds up a mirror that will keep a lot of us reflecting on reality and gives a new direction to what ‘thinking out of the box’ might mean.

When I read this, my involuntary and completely sincere thought was: “Wow, I’d like to watch this talk and meet this guy!” Somehow the contents of our own thoughts seem to sound a lot more inspiring (and inspired) when they are reflected back to us through the words of others. Having read books and watched talks from other authors and speakers over the years, I’ve drifted towards the naïve notion that the people behind those wonderful ideas had a degree of inner clarity far greater than their audience's. Yet my insight from reading the blurb above is that that is not necessarily the case. After all, this time I know better than anyone how much the speaker in question is troubled by inner doubts and questions.