Video: TED Talk with Matt Ridley: “When ideas have sex” + Dr. Marc’s Response
See this video and read about Matt Ridley on the TED site.
Dr. Gafni responds…
Ridley is both perceptive and limited. His core perception is the realization that specialization is essential to creativity. Drawing directly on the economic work of Friedrich Hayek he recognizes – in a passing sentence – that specialization is rooted in the “special perspective of each individual.” The specialization thesis is sprinkled throughout Ridley’s book, a couple of sentences at a time. It is never really brought together or given coherent form. More seriously, however, its assumptions are limited, flatland assumptions rooted in an old, tried and highly discredited materialistic neo-Darwinism.
Ridley is groping blindly for a Unique Self understanding, but cannot quite find it – so he essentially grafts some Unique Self-insights – onto his Separate Self-flatland worldview.
The distinction between the levels of self is lost on him. He ascribes a kind of infinite creativity and innovation to separate self without any justification. He assumes an evolutionary We space (without calling it that) that emerges through random emergence – wanting to ascribe to it quasi mystical character while at the same time denying the core gnosis that forms the ground of a genuine evolutionary mysticism.
Remember our core formula: True Self + Perspective = Evolutionary Unique Self
Unique Self is the irreducibly unique expression or essence living as you, in you and through you. Uniqueness at this level of consciousness is the currency of connection, instead of the cause for alienation.
Separate Self + Perspective = merely ego self writ larger, and engenders an endless negotiation in which each ego self attempts to gain the most and give the least for its own perspective and survival. The result, in the words of British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, is the “natural state of grasping, greed and war.”
It is only your Unique Self –
Expressed as your Unique Perspective –
Which creates your Unique Insight –
Which is the ground of your infinite creativity –
Infinite because your Unique Self is the expression of essence which is infinite
Which is Evolution awakening to itself
Through Your Evolutionary Unique Self
Manifest as your evolutionary creativity
Which is the ground of the innovation
Rooted in specialization
That is today – your infinite special-ness
Which is the ground of genuine optimism
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