4.1 • 11.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
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0:00.0 | It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. You're about to hear a talk from a historian who is going to challenge the way you think about reality. Big promise, I know, but in his 2020 talk at TEDx Ohio State University, Greg Anderson uses a different perspective on the human past |
0:23.0 | to at least encourage us to change the way we think about ourselves. |
0:27.5 | And maybe in rethinking our current realities, |
0:30.1 | we can make a less destructive reality in the future. |
0:36.0 | In the next few minutes, I hope to change the way you think about the very nature of reality |
0:42.5 | itself. I'm not a physicist and I'm not a philosopher. I'm a historian. And after studying the |
0:49.8 | ancient Greeks and many other pre-modern peoples for more than 20 years as a professional, I've become |
0:55.9 | convinced that they all lived in real worlds very different from our own. Now, of course, |
1:02.9 | you and I here today, we take it for granted that there's just one ultimate reality out |
1:08.5 | there. Our reality, a fixed universal world of experience ruled by |
1:14.6 | timeless laws of science and nature. But I want you to see things differently. I want you to see |
1:21.9 | that humans have always lived in a pluriverse of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one. And if you're |
1:31.1 | willing to see this pluriverse of many worlds, it will fundamentally change, I hope, the way |
1:37.9 | you think about the human past and hopefully the present and the future as well. |
1:51.1 | Now, let's get started by asking three basic questions about the contents of our reality, |
1:54.8 | the real world that you and I share right here, right now. |
2:01.3 | First of all, what is it that makes something real in our real world? |
2:05.0 | Well, for us, real things are material things, |
2:07.7 | things made of matter that we can somehow see, |
2:11.6 | like atoms, people, trees, mountains, planets. |
2:22.9 | By the same token, invisible, immaterial things, like gods and demons, heavens and hells, these are considered unreal. |
2:24.3 | They're simply beliefs, subjective ideas that exist only in the realm of the mind. |
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